Snow on Summer Solstice
by roisaber
Summary: Asuka Langley narrates what it's like to be an Eva pilot through her own eyes. She's sometimes sarcastic, sometimes cruel, and sometimes funny; one thing's for sure, she definitely isn't boring. Can Asuka grow out of her desperate desire to grow up?
1. 00 - Tempestuous Girl

**Chapter-00**

**Tempestuous Girl**

"Synch rate 19.1%!"

"Come on, Asuka! Concentrate!"

I was concentrating as hard as I could, dammit. Anything worth doing was worth doing by sheer willpower alone, so once again I disregarded the teachings of all the Zen masters and Catholic anchorites my tutor made me study and allowed my mind to fill with raw fury. Everything went blank except for me and the strange mind of Eva-02. For a fraction of a second, I saw out of my Evangelion's eyes. Then that bitch interrupted again.

"Asuka, you're up to 19.3%. You can do better than this!"

Something inside me snapped, and I reached up and tore the helmet off my head. Misato's angry voice became nothing but a tinny echo on the floor of the otherwise empty Test Plug. I reached up over my head, hit the emergency release, and climbed out of the top of the plug. A pair of harried technicians tried to talk to me, but I brushed them aside. The last obstacle to freedom came in the form of Misato Katsuragi, standing right in front of the elevator with her hands on her hips.

"Just where do you think you're going, young lady?" the Captain demanded.

I shrugged. "I don't know. I don't care. Out."

"You get right back in there this instant and we'll take this exercise from the top."

I pretended to think about it.

"No."

Her eyes could have ignited coal from her gaze alone. "What do you mean, no?"

"Are you stupid or something?" I laughed, coldly. "I mean fucking no."

She reached back for a slap, and I stood, unmoving, and stared right back at her. I barely felt it when she smacked me across the jaw, raising a pink, hand-shaped welt on my right cheek. I could see her chest heaving under her uniform; she was furious – and impotent.

"Are you done?" I asked without moving an inch.

"Damn it, Asuka," she breathed. "The world can't afford for you to act like a spoiled little brat at a time like this. We've only just defeated Sahaquiel and we have no way of knowing when the next Angel will attack."

I gestured angrily, a dim imitation of my father's Teutonic mannerisms.

"Maybe I'm not a spoiled little brat! Maybe I'm a human being with human needs. Did you ever think of that? Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, I need an afternoon off!"

I could see gears turning in Misato's head. She was so obvious that I could almost read her thoughts. _Sure, it's normal for the girl to need a break_, I could almost hear say to herself. _But so much is riding on her success! She's the only person who can save the world, but I should be careful about how much I push her. What harm could it do if I just gave her the evening off? How likely is it, really, that the next Angel will choose just this moment to attack?_

"Fine," the other woman said out loud. "But I want you in at oh six hundred tomorrow and we're going to start this exercise from the beginning."

I breathed a sigh of relief I didn't know I was holding.

"Thanks, Misato," I accidentally said before I remembered how angry I still was. "And I'll be in at oh seven hundred, the usual time."

Misato wordlessly stepped aside and let me onto the elevator. I was sure I'd pay for this later, but for now, I took advantage of the opportunity to do what I _want_ for the rest of the day instead of being ordered around like a child. I was an adult. It had nothing to do with my biological age. If you've been locked in mortal combat with alien monsters, and you survive, that automatically makes you an adult. No matter what people like Misato said about me, nobody could take away the truth; I've singlehandedly slain Angels before, and I will do it again, and again, and again. I'll do it as many times as it takes.

Nobody tried to stop me while I navigated the vertical labyrinth that would take up me to the surface. Virtually everyone in NERV recognized me immediately, of course. Not only had I saved their asses, but it's fair to say that my physical features are distinctive compared to the native Japanese. Red hair, blue eyes, and normal-sized boobs all marked me out as a stranger in a strange land. A few members of the NERV staff gawked as I strode confidently by; I found myself annoyed by their attention, but also flattered by it.

I wasted no time in heading to the girl's locker room and stripping off my plugsuit. I was naked underneath, but I didn't really care if the other women changing cast occasional glances at my Western features. I took a quick shower, dried in the static burst dryer, and then assembled my civilian outfit for a night on the town. Today, I had my favorite yellow sundress, with white silk panties underneath. I didn't bother about a bra. I had better assets than most of the Japanese girls and I wasn't ashamed to prove it. When I was dressed and ready, I grabbed my purse and finished my journey to the surface from the chthonic depths of NERV HQ.

I blinked as I stepped into the harsh light of Tokyo in summer. Ever since the Second Impact, the seasons were all wonky, but the relentless, annoying screech of cicadas greeted me all the same.

"If the Angels manage to wipe out all of humanity, the cicadas will still be there," I muttered.

I made my way to the rail station that served NERV HQ along with a few other important government contractors. There were a few businessmen that shot me curious glances. I had no mind to return to – ugh – Misato's apartment, so instead I decided to hit up the Ginza district for a little retail therapy. Naturally, a few people were intrigued by the young, strange foreigner sharing a train car with them. I felt a little self-conscious from all the stares, so finally I turned to confront the nearest character making eyes at me.

"What are you looking at?" I demanded of him.

He quickly went back to his tablet computer and I didn't catch him glancing at me for the rest of the train ride.

Hopefully the new Ginza district would last a few more Angel battles, because it was an incredible spectacle. All of the biggest remaining fashion brands had shops, from Prada to Dior to Chanel. There were restaurants and old-style bookshops. The sun was just setting, and Ginza responded to the coming darkness with light. Japanese lanterns shone next to LED billboards advertising the latest in clothing and accessories, and the pedestrian boulevards were thick with the people of Tokyo-3 trying to lose themselves in their shopping, just like me.

My first stop was to an upscale lingerie store that sold Carine Gilson. Much to my annoyance, stupid Misato's stupid washing machine tore my panties to ribbons after only a few months. But it's not like I exactly had time to hand wash my own delicates, between balancing school, my work at NERV, and trying _once in a while_ to be a normal human girl. I ended up picking up three pairs of silk panties; one white, one black, one pink. A color for all occasions. I probably shouldn't admit how much it cost, but what the Hell; in all, it was over ten thousand yen for three pairs of name brand panties. I handed over my Amex Centurion, and the girl behind the counter raised her eyebrow. I just waved her concern aside.

Believe it or not, NERV doesn't even pay me a salary. They pay me in future promises of fame and fortune and a full scholarship to any one of Tokyo-3's one remaining public universities. Fortunately, my father had set me up as CEO of a shell corporation that handles my investments and inheritance, and in return for sitting on a boring board meeting once in awhile I get to carry around a company charge card. And I make good use of it; why shouldn't I? I could literally die at any hour of any day. I am literally the one human being that stands between humanity and total oblivion, after all, it's not like the human race can entrust its future to a whiny little boy like Shinji or a creepy inhuman robot like Rei. I think the girl behind the counter knew I was an Eva pilot, but at expensive stores the help is smart enough not to antagonize paying customers.

I went into Chanel next, but I didn't like anything I saw so walked right back out without even replying to the woman trying to hound me into trying on something, anything. You can always tell when these putzes are paid on commission, they're always so politely pushy. I ended up mostly window shopping until 2300 hours, though I did pick up a cute gothy dress, a skirt that was guaranteed to irritate my teachers, and a desperately needed rainbow of socks. I was starting to feel tired, so I decided to head home and hope that Misato had already gone to bed.

I stared out of the window as the train clanged down the tracks. Tokyo-3 was nothing like Bonn, which had survived the cataclysm of the Second Impact almost intact, or Los Angeles, which retreated into the mountains after most of the metropolis was consumed by the sea. Tokyo-3 was built from the underground up to be a bastion of defense against the Angels, and everything in the city was angular and heavily reinforced so it could survive the stretches of being lowered into the GeoFront in the event of an attack. Even in the dark, the city looked like one big weapon instead of a place where people actually lived and worked, and it made me shiver to compare the skyscrapers to the beautiful, medieval suburbs of Bonn or the new Los Angeles carved into California's hillsides. I sighed. How unlucky that I'd been born in time to see a world reduced to this.

I got off the train and waited for the elevator to take me up to Misato's apartment. Our building seriously creeped me out, and I clutched my purse tightly while I waited for the elevator to come whisk me to the upper floor. I'd never seen anyone else in our apartment, and I was starting to wonder if Misato somehow had the whole building to herself. Instead of being comforted by that idea, I found it really disturbing. I made it to her apartment without incident, and I tried to quietly turn the key in the lock. No luck. Misato was still up, waiting for me, and I could tell by the flush in her face and the empty beer cans on the table that she'd had more than a few to drink. She looked up at me.

"Asuka. I was really hoping to talk to you when you got home. Where have you been?"

I could tell by the tone of her voice that I was treading on thin ice. I decided to bite back the sarcastic remark I was brewing up, and instead went for plaintive.

"Misato, I'm sorry about earlier. I just needed a little break, alright? If you want to talk about something, can we talk about it tomorrow morning?" I tried a wan smile. "I'm tired, plus I have to be in exercises at 0600 hours tomorrow."

Misato shook her head, and she looked strangely sad.

"Being an adult doesn't mean always getting what you want, Asuka."

"I know that! I'm just tired, okay?"

"I'll drive you to work tomorrow. Shinji can take the train when he wakes up."

"Thanks, Misato."

I went to my room and hurriedly got undressed for bed. My peace didn't last long; it seemed like my alarm went off before my head even hit the pillow, and I was ungratified to discover that I had a mild headache, probably from the drinking the day before. I hated sleeping on a futon instead of a real Western bed, and my back ached, adding to my distemper. Misato barged in before I could even put on any clothes, and she glared at me and crossed her arms.

"You're not even dressed yet!?" she demanded. "You should have been up twenty minutes ago!"

"Sorry, Misato. It's not like it's Sunday or anything," I muttered.

"Hurry up and get moving," she said before slamming my door shut behind her.

Mumbling curses, I put on some street clothes. The weather was bound to be nice, so I put on a white skirt and red tank top to keep the summer from cooking me inside my own outfit. By the time I got out of my room I found that it was already 0545 hours and Misato had breakfast ready. I begrudgingly ate the omelet she prepared, which seemed to be made of thrice-cooked eggs and half-cooked bacon. I wolfed it down, so much the better to avoid the thing slithering over my taste buds.

"Asuka, I know you're having a tough time," Misato said as she threaded through light traffic on the highway that led to NERV HQ. "But you have to give consideration to people around you. How can you save the world if you can't even relate to other people?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Dealing with people like Shinji has nothing to do with my ability to pilot Eva-02."

"You're wrong!" she said, startling me with her vehemence. "It's got _everything_ to do with it, Asuka. You should know as well as anyone that the Evas are more than just machines; they're like people. And if you can't relate to people, you'll never be more than mediocre where it counts."

I glared at her. "Mediocre? Are you kidding? I'm the best. I have higher synch rates than Shinji and Rei combined!"

"At some times. Under some circumstances," she replied, shaking her head.

"Are you kidding?" I was incredulous. "I'm the only thing standing between the world and those fucked-up crazy monsters!"

Misato gripped the steering wheel tighter, and I could tell by her breathing that she was trying to swallow a surge of anger. So what? It's not like she could understand what it was like.

"Asuka, I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to be there for you."

I countered, "And what would you know? When you were my age, all you had to worry about was fashion and boys! _You_ never had to pilot an insane superweapon against aliens. How could you possibly be there for me? How could you possibly understand what it's like to go through this day after day after day?"

"You're right. When I was a child - "

That tore it.

"A child!?" I shouted. "How _dare_ you call me a child! I do more for the world than any hundred-year old accountant anywhere in the world! Any ten of them combined! Why don't you try judging me for what I do, instead of applying some completely _arbitrary_ assessment of what my biological age means for me, as if my life experiences were directly comparable to those idiots in the school you _make_ me attend?"

Misato let out a breath. "Fine, Asuka."

"Fine."

The rest of the drive to NERV HQ was filled with blissful silence, without that woman yapping her useless advice.

"We're here," Misato said coldly when we pulled into her designated spot in the GeoFront's underground parking structure.

I stopped myself before saying something that would ignite a new argument.

Misato went down to the control room for the test plugs, while I stripped out of my clothes and put on my plugsuit. It was a weird sensation, wearing the suit. It clung to me like a second skin, fitting its way along all my curves and crevasses, hiding nothing. In a way, I felt more naked in the plugsuit than I would have felt if I were actually naked; the suit seemed to draw attention to those places where I was most different from my Japanese peers. Even though it was so closely fitted to my skin, I could still feel it moving and pulling along the tiny hairs on my arms, or the back of my neck. I squirmed into the thing, eschewing all offers of help. When I was finally satisfied that I was as dressed as I could be in the suit, I took the elevator down to the plug room and obediently climbed into my unit.

"Please put on your helmet, Asuka," Misato called out.

I sighed, but did it anyway. The Eva's OS booted up and the umbilical cord that connected the test plug to my Eva herself ignited with information and energy. Unit-02 was pissed.

"What is it, girl?" I asked, knowing I wouldn't receive an answer. "Who pissed in your LCL this morning?"

If Unit-02 weren't securely manacled to the floor, it would have thrashed in upset.

"Hey, Misato," I called over the comm. "I don't know if we'll get anywhere this morning. Unit-02 is totally freaking out."

"You're going to have to try anyway, Asuka. _You're_ the one who has to help get that Eva's emotions under control."

Her voice was still cold from our earlier fight.

Wordless emotions boiled inside me as I tried to talk the monster down. No one really knew how intelligent the Evas were, or how much they could be called biological and how much they could be called mechanical. You could try working it out by weight; you could compare the volume filled by LCL fluid and other biological components with the volume occupied by machines, but that didn't do justice to the complexity of the hybrid things. Unit-02 was in a mood, and though I cooed and tried to send positive imagery, she could barely hear me over her own misguided anger.

"What's your problem?" I asked the thrashing thing. "Why are you being such a bitch?"

"Asuka, your synch rate is at 4.7%," Misato warned.

"I know! Scheiße! Unit-02 is acting totally crazy!"

I could see, in my mind's eye if not in my actual field of vision, some of what Eva-02 was thinking in her own head. I could feel physical pain, like I was under attack from monsters, and her imagination was cloudy with visions of fire and death and destruction. I took a deep breath and tried to send the Eva soothing thoughts, but it didn't seem to visibly help.

"Asuka," Misato said, slowly and deliberately. "What have we talked about?"

I sighed and repeated from rote.

"We're fundamentally connected to the Eva psychologically at the most basic level. If it's behaving in an unexpected way, it's probably because there's something we haven't examined about ourselves. Look, I know all that, okay? If you ask me maybe she's going through her period."

"Are you ever going to learn?" Misato hissed through the speaker.

I sighed and tried to concentrate. Instead of blocking out Unit-02's crazy visions, I allowed them to wash over me, and replace my own senses. It hurt. I felt like Sun Wukong trapped in the Buddha's hand; I was imprisoned in an alien body in a world I never made. And somewhere out there, my – daughter? was behaving in a foolish way that would lead her to great pain and misfortune. I tried to make sense of the imagery I was getting from the mecha, but it was a tough slog. At times, it seemed so recognizably human, and yet at other times it was so alien that it caused me to have a panic attack.

"You're up to 17.0%, Asuka. You're doing fine," Misato said with surprising gentleness.

I tried to shut her out and focus entirely on Unit-02. In my mind's eye, I could control her, and I lowered my – her – arm back onto the floor. With a little more concentration, I was able to get Unit-02 to stop thrashing, and to gently lie back on the armored floor.

"20.9%. Asuka, if we release Unit-02's manacles, do you think you can control it?"

"No!" I cried. "Not today. She's still dangerous!"

"Asuka, we're scheduled for combined arms exercises today, remember? Shinji's already here and he's in final preps now."

I could have cried. "Misato, listen to me. Unit-02 is _not_ stable right now! If you unchain her from the deck, I don't know if I can control her."

"You're hovering around 19.5%, give or take. I believe in you Asuka."

I slammed my head against the back of my seat, which caused Unit-02 to shriek in confusion and anger.

"Damn it Asuka! Whatever you're doing, stop it! You just lost 4%!"

Shinji suddenly cut into the channel. "I'm here."

"Asuka, 15.9%. Shinji, 12.9%," an unknown technician announced.

One thing was for sure. I wasn't going to let that fucking kid beat me. I pushed everything out of my mind but myself and Unit-02, and I tried to consciously slow my pounding heart. I was greeted with more confused, angry imagery, but I didn't let it bother me. Part of my training was learning lucid dreaming techniques. More and more, I found that I didn't even flinch at nightmares, and I could laugh at random dream monsters no matter how big or terrifying they were. I let her emotions wash over me, while still keeping my heart surrounded by a tightly clenched fist of anger and determination.

"Shinji, 15.9%. Asuka, 23.2%."

I felt a sudden surge of elation, which I quickly swallowed. 23.2% wasn't my best synchronization rate by any means, but it meant that I was starting to climb again after a long, painful decline. Maybe Misato would back the fuck off for a few days after seeing that number.

"Live fire exercise is armed and operational. Shinji, Asuka, we're going to free your Evas. Please walk slowly and carefully to the elevator and it'll take you to the test range. Asuka, are you ready?"

I nodded, feeling freshly confident. "Go ahead, Misato. I've got Unit-02 under control."

They freed the bolts holding the two Evas to the deck, and I slowly stood up. It was a strange, disorienting sensation to walk with the Eva. I had to take the impulses that I'd use to move my own arms and legs and instead transfer it to the giant, hulking mecha, and the machine's center of balance was completely different from my own. It was like learning to use an entirely new set of muscles, as if I'd been paralyzed my whole life and then suddenly been jacked into a new, completely functional body. But I had enough practice now that I was able to walk a measured but steady pace to the elevator, and I held the bars with my – that is, Unit-02's – arms while I waited for Shinji to join me.

"Status?" Misato asked, staring too intently at the pair of mecha to even glance at the control board.

"Shinji is steady at 15.9%. Asuka's bouncing around between 20 and 23.5%."

"Steady, Asuka," Misato cautioned. "Higher numbers don't mean anything if you can't maintain them."

I know that!

"I know that!"

Shinji joined me on the elevator, and it took both of us down to the live fire exercise room. I don't know what kind of materials they made the massive, maze-like chamber out of, but it was incredible that anything could stand up to the fury of an enraged Evangelion. I lit up Unit-02's A.T. Field in preparation for whatever Misato had planned for us today. Managing an A.T. Field was a funny thing. Normally, it didn't interact with material objects at all, but when you focused it into a shield, or a spear, it could block or penetrate normal, physical matter. Misato gave us no warning before the drones opened up, and I was furious to discover the tricky bitch had set them up to ambush us from behind.

"Shinji!" I said, out of a perhaps misguided sense of camaraderie. "Behind us!"

Getting the bulky monsters to turn was no easy task, but we were able to swing around before the drones got another burst of fire in. The bullets pinged harmlessly off the Evangelion's armored skin, or occasionally penetrated it, generating the kind of pain that to an Eva was little more or little less than a bee sting. I caught a few in the back but I shrugged it off; I'd had worse. The drone was too far away to stab, so I opened up with Unit-02's needle gun. Fifteen million New Yen was reduced to scrap in an instant.

Shinji handled his shortly after I got mine. I set Unit-02's sensors to wide scan, anticipating another ambush from behind. Sure enough, Misato was as predictable as ever, and immediately after Shinji dealt with the second drone, two more appeared immediately behind us. Expecting the attack I spun on my heel, and with two rapid bursts from the needle gun, I reduced thirty million more New Yen to junk. I slunk towards one of the corners and stayed on guard; Misato's third wave attack was almost always an elaboration on the first two.

"Shinji, 16.0%. Asuka, 23.3%," the technician announced.

Sure enough, four drones appeared from hidden doors in the ceiling of the live fire room, one at each corner. Quick as a snake, I stabbed upward with my progressive knife, completely shredding the drone that appeared just above my right shoulder. Without a moment's hesitation I turned to the next target, and locked in on it with Unit-02's targeting system. My needle cannon made short work of the second drone. Shinji was still busy dodging the third, so I took careful aim at the fourth and squeezed the trigger while it tried to swing around to flank Unit-01. I was immensely satisfied to see it blown to ribbons before Shinji even finished with his own target.

"Good work, Asuka," Misato said grudgingly. "That's all for today."

"What!? We just got started," I cried over the comm.

"The engineers want to make some fine-tune adjustment to your gyros. Unit-01 and Unit-02 need to go to dock for the rest of the day to finish that."

"Fine," I grumbled, intensely annoyed.

That was just like Misato, to interrupt right when things were getting fun.

Shinji and I stalked back over to the service elevator that would take our Evas back up to the dock.

"You did good today, Asuka," Shinji said. "You took out the fourth target before I even finished up with mine."

"Yeah, well, that's what a superior synchronization rate gets you. Unit-02 is very responsive thanks to the powerful psychic connection we share."

He went quiet, probably dazzled by my superior intellect.

As soon as we had our Evas parked and powered down, Misato sent us back to the locker rooms to change into our street clothes. As soon as we were civilian again, she herded us into her car.

"You both did excellently today," she announced. "Shinji, you came close to beating your own synchronization record and your Eva didn't take any damage. Asuka, you were able to stabilize at an unusually high rate and take down more than your share of targets. I'm going to take you out to a nice lunch to celebrate."

"Thanks, Misato," Shinji replied genuinely.

I just attached the neural interface for my iPod, and put on Liszt. I'd rather listen to German romanticism than that woman blather on and on about what I already know; namely, how talented I am.

Misato took us to a very nice restaurant uptown that specialized in both Japanese and Alsatian cuisine. I was surprised when we got out of the car; it was unseasonably cool outside, and I got goosebumps on my arms and bare legs. The restaurant was on the 40th floor of a skyscraper and offered commanding views of Tokyo-3 and its surrounding hillsides. Misato got some kind of totally non-traditional fusion dish I wouldn't touch with a 12 foot progressive knife, Shinji got some sushi, and I ordered a hearty Bäckeoffe casserole that would probably sit in my stomach for a full day. Misato even let me order a glass of champagne, which I thought was particularly nice of her.

"I want you to know that I really am proud of you both," Misato announced after her third glass of red wine.

"So, what comes next?" I asked.

Misato screwed up her face and thought about it.

"Well, tomorrow, the pair of you have school. I expect that you'll only be there for a half day and then NERV will bring you in to test the adjustments to the gyros."

I groaned. "Really? Another day of walking side to side in the live fire room while the engineers geek out over the geometry of our ovaries?"

"It's not so bad, Asuka," Shinji tried to interrupt. "It's better that we find out if there's a problem with the balance _before_ we end up face to face with an Angel."

I groaned again, but there was really no help for it. It was kind of ironic; in a way, my talent made me these peoples' slave. Since nobody could do the job like I could, that meant another day of pacing around in an Eva while technicians calculated Unit-02's sway to the nth degree. I suddenly felt tremendously sorry for her. No wonder she was so irritated all the time.

I'm not going to lie; between the champagne and the heavy, sticky casserole, I feel asleep in the car to the sound of Wagner echoing in my ears.

**End Chapter-00**


	2. 01 - Rust Colored Frost

**Chapter-01: Rust Colored Frost**

School, o school, how do I hate you? Let me count the ways. Prithy shall I compare you to death by Chinese water torture?

Or maybe I'll go for Seuss.

I would hate school in the rain,

I would hate school with Hussein,

I don't like my school at all.

Okay, that didn't make a whole lot of sense.

What I'm trying to say is, I really, really, really don't like going to school. When I lived in Bonn, or Los Angeles, my family paid for a private tutor. I learned to read Pythagoras in the original Greek and Petronius in the original Latin. When I got to Japan, Misato… insisted, that I attend public school with Shinji. How ridiculous. She said something about me needing socialization, but what's the point of talking to the dunderheads that go to Shinji's school?

And the lessons! Gott in Himmel, the lessons! The teachers basically read out of dry textbooks, expounding on nothing more than what's programmed into them by the Ministry of Education. Instead of reading Euclid, Ovid, Darwin, and Kant with my tutors, I get dumb lesson plans worked out for the lowest common denominator by equally dumb curriculum administrators. And frankly, looking at some of the other students that attend with me, I can hardly blame them. The rest of my class is crass, dull, and dumb all in equal measure. I don't think there's a single one in the bunch who will ever amount to anything. I mean, I know that not everyone can be as smart as me and I shouldn't hold it against them, but Scheiße!

I finished dressing and combing my hair to discover Misato impatiently waiting for me at the breakfast table.

"You're late," she muttered.

I pretended to look at my watch, which, of course, I wasn't wearing.

"Not that late," I answered sweetly.

"Damn it, Asuka," Misato started in.

"Look, if I'm late, it's time for me to go, right? I don't have time for a lecture." I lifted a cereal bar from a cabinet, grabbed my bag, and headed out the door before Misato could regain her steam.

It was a short train ride from Misato's apartment to Shinji's school, and I was grateful that he took an earlier train so that I didn't have to talk to him. Shinji is whiny, childish, and completely self-absorbed; he seems to think that having his father run out on him to run NERV marks him out as someone special. Of course, almost everyone at our school has lost someone important to them in an Angel attack or during the Second Impact, a father, a mother, or a sibling. Some have lost everyone. So I don't take Shinji's emo brooding too seriously when he sulks about it. Shinji's father is powerful, important, and, more to the point, still alive. My mother isn't.

I caught sight of myself in the reflective surface of the train window, and I took a moment to double check my hair. I can't exactly credit myself for this, but I really won the genetic lottery by getting my mother's German genes instead of her Japanese. My long auburn hair hangs down almost to my ass, and while it's a total hassle to keep clean and untangled, it marks me out as someone proud and important. My eyes are as blue as… well, as the ocean… once was.

Aheh. Anyway, I have peachy white skin, largely free of the blemishes that seem to torture a lot of my teenage peers. Boobs that draw the eye without insulting it, and an ass to match. Judging by photos of my mother, I'll probably be done with all my growing within a couple years, and though I seem tall for my age now I'll probably be only a little taller than average when I finally get out of this phase of early adulthood. Frankly, I've got it all. Thin without angularity, curves without the fat, and a wit that's just as sharp as my appearance; I really have it going on, if I do say so myself. And the pastels of my school uniform do a good job of contrasting against my natural features to bring out the best in my appearance. Unlike those Japanese girls, who look plain and dull no matter what kind of outfit you stick them in. I gave myself once last once over and turned away with a curt nod. I resolved that no matter what, today was going to be a good day.

I arrived at school just after the bell indicating assembly in class, which was of course the optimal time to arrive. I wasn't marked as late on the absence sheet which might earn me a lecture from Misato, but I also didn't have to socialize with the idiots they laughably call my "peers." Homeroom dragged by slowly. We were assigned some kind of group project I didn't pay any attention to, and most of the other students had long since learned I wouldn't give them the time of day if they tried to talk to me. Instead, I spent most of the time struggling through the Kanji of Hardboiled Wonderland at the End of the World on my e-reader. It's funny; Murakami hadn't lived long enough to see the Second Impact with his own eyes, and yet, somehow he predicted it in his literature. Perhaps an event so profound creates ripples that not only define the future, but even reach back into the past to presage its own arrival.

Those were the kind of questions that what we read in school _never_ inspired.

The history teacher came next, and I played a simple but addictive physics puzzler on my phone while he droned on and on.

"Asuka!" he suddenly shouted.

Gottverdammt, caught.

I affected my sweetest voice. "Yes, senpai?"

"Perhaps _you'd_ like to tell the class which famous Persian conqueror instituted a policy of multiculturalism, religious tolerance, and protection of minorities under his reign?"

I didn't even have to think. "Cyrus the Great."

The senpai sighed and shook his head.

"Asuka, I know you think you know everything already, but if you never pay attention to what other people have to say, you'll never learn anything new. You'll shut yourself in a little box separated from all other people. You'll find yourself totally, utterly alone."

"Yes, senpai."

"Regardless, then, back to Cyrus…"

I went back to my phone. I knew all this stuff already.

Lunch was basically the most intolerable part of my school day. I generally didn't eat much and I avoid the cafeteria like the plague, but there are always people who hunt me down wanting to talk to me. First, of course, there's the group projects the stupid teachers always make us do. I've always got at least one hanging over my head, forcing me to talk to a few of these clowns and make enough basic contributions that nobody will complain to the teachers that I'm not doing any work. I generally find it easier to hammer out the write-up if they provide the research, relieving me of the need to talk to the other members of the group much. Naturally, my group always gets an A. Apart from that, everyone in the school knows that Shinji and I are Eva pilots. It's not the kind of thing you can keep secret, unfortunately, and once one student knows the entire school soon finds out. So I can't get through lunch without being hassled by some Gundam-obsessed otaku who wants to hear what it's like to pilot an Evangelion. All of them imagine that they want to be pilots, too. Well, I can say for a fact they probably wouldn't survive the first attempt at synchronization.

I heard a familiar voice. "Hey, Asuka."

"What?" I asked without looking up.

"I wanted to ask you something."

I sighed and put down my coffee. "What is it, Shinji?"

Obviously, I was going to have to find a better hiding place.

"I just wanted to ask you something about A.T. Fields," he said. "Why do you think they call them Absolute Terror?"

I laughed, maybe a bit coldly. "What's this, all of a sudden?"

"When I got to NERV, I didn't really think much about what A.T. stood for. I assumed it meant something like 'Aura Transmission Field' or 'Anti-Taint Field.' When I first learned that it actually stands for Absolute Terror… I felt my heart sink. Why do you think they call it that? It's not because of the threat the Angels pose… our Evas have one too. And so do all human souls. What do you think it means?"

It was rare for Shinji to think about anything at all, so I decided against immediately dismissing his concern like I normally would. I decided to give him my answer – that is, the real answer.

"Think about light," I said out loud. "Your brain is totally enclosed in your skull and not a single photon from the outside world penetrates it. Instead, your eyes perceive the photons flowing in from all around you, and they transmit an electrical signal to your brain through your optic nerve. Your brain sees electrons, not photons coming from the sun."

"In the same way, the only way we can relate to other people is through the image of them we construct in our minds. We have a framework for understanding what others think and how they act and we automatically fit everything they do into the assumptions we make. You should read Immanuel Kant; he explains this better than I can. But I think the A.T. Field is what's created when that psychological framework is threatened and we come in danger of _actually_ encountering another person totally as they are. It's a defense mechanism of the ego when it becomes threatened with dissolution when it encounters the primordial Other."

Shinji was quiet for a minute.

"Why do you think people are so afraid of each other?" he asked.

"I mean, that's obvious, right?" I asked, waving my can of coffee. "Identity comes from differentiation. If everything in the world was blue, you wouldn't even know that blue was a color. It's only in contrast to red, or yellow, that you can perceive 'blue' as a separate identity. What the A.T. Field does is it preserves the differentiation of our ego from the ego of other living beings. An Absolute Terror field is what allows us to be individuals; without it, we'd become some kind of… goo made up of random psychic structures floating through the void."

Shinji shook his head. "I really don't know if you're right or not. You know a lot more about philosophy than me."

"Why don't you just worry about your piloting, Shinji? It's not like I need you or anything, but it's better when the Angels get confused by multiple targets."

He suddenly blurted, "What do you think of my father?"

"I think he's a great man. Why are you asking me all this?" I demanded.

"Because the only thing you're ever willing to talk about it yourself!"

His insult lingered in the air like a rotten fart. Even Shinji looked surprised by what he'd just said.

"Get out of my sight, Ikari Shinji!" I shouted as he scurried away.

Angrily, I finished my coffee. I'm not really like what he said. It's just difficult to find people who are on my own level. Misato? She's a drunk and an incompetent. Shinji? He's as dull as matte grey paint. As for Rei, she's a creepy soulless doll who makes me sick just to look at. Don't even get me started on the kids at school. How can I possibly find someone to relate to when nobody can even understand half of what I say? I talk about the Zhuangzi, they talk about anime. I talk about physics and they dissertate on the latest teen idols. Why would I waste my time with such people? With a sudden shiver, I realized that it was quite unseasonably cold. I was relieved when the bell finally rang, summoning us back into the warm classrooms.

The school day went on like that. I glanced up often enough to write down the Kanji I didn't know, and then went back to playing games on my phone. The teachers don't pay much attention and what are they going to do about it anyway? I could get the call from NERV at any time so you might say their lives _depend_ on me playing video games in class. Two hours before classes got out, Shinji and I got the call from HQ. The engineers had finished the adjustments to the gyros and we were to come in immediately to test the equipment.

It was definitely cold on the train platform that would take us to NERV HQ. Shinji stood next to me, lost in whatever substitutes for thought in his world.

"Hey, Asuka," he began.

I didn't look at him.

"Sorry about earlier."

"Whatever," I replied.

"Really. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

Finally, I turned to face him.

"First of all, you _did not_ hurt my feelings. And second, don't bother, okay!? We're not friends. We're not nakama. We're just coworkers, trying to do a job and get it done."

"Sorry. I just wish you'd give me a chance."

I took a deep breath and let it out.

"Look, Shinji, I'm sure you're a nice guy, okay?" I explained. "Maybe in a different world things would be different. Maybe in a world where your dad didn't abandon you and my father didn't push me into college before I was even a teenager, or maybe if there'd never been a Second Impact; we might have been able to have a normal friendship. But it's not that world and we can't. We have to face up to the facts as they are, not as we wish they were."

Quietly, he asked, "What are you so afraid of, Asuka? Do you think that having friends will dissolve your A.T. Field and prevent you from fighting Angels?"

"Don't be dumb, Shinji. It's just that I have to put the mission before everything else. If I have to choose between saving you and destroying an Angel, I'm not going to hesitate. Having feelings for you would just get in the way of that."

I said more than I meant to, and I quickly looked away.

The train, in Its infinite love and mercy, chose that moment to pull into the station, brakes squealing. I quickly shoved Shinji out of the way and took a seat in the mostly-empty car; between morning and evening rush hours, it actually wasn't too crowded on public transit. I crossed my legs and immediately pulled my e-reader out of my backpack. I didn't want to give Shinji the chance to make any more fruitless conversation. Shinji stared out of the window and I read more Murakami as the train rattled along the tracks. I had to frequently look up Kanji, but fortunately the e-reader had a built in dictionary with extensive references and explanations. The thing was an invaluable asset to my ever-increasing Japanese literacy and I could have hugged it. My e-reader was the only friend I needed.

Misato met us at the train station, and from the look on her face, I knew I wasn't going to like the news.

"Okay, you two," she said. "I've got some bad news. The engineers are insisting that you have to do a full combat-ready insertion today."

The pair of us groaned in unison.

"Can't you do anything, Misato?" Shinji asked.

"Sorry. They'll just complain to upstairs if I don't, and then upstairs will make it an order. I know it sucks, but please just tough it out, okay? Not for me, not for NERV, not for the technicians, but for the entire planet."

Full combat insertion sucked. What that meant is that today, we wouldn't be using the test plugs; instead we'd be fully immersed in LCL and deposited directly into the Eva as if we were going straight into battle. I didn't really mind the taste or smell of the strange liquid, so much, but there was a primal sensation of drowning every time even though the stuff was totally breathable. No matter how much I knew intellectually that the stuff wouldn't harm me, my body didn't, and I would thrash and cough and scream completely against the will of my actual human mind. It was an awful sensation. To make matters worse, when they finally pulled us out, there was a guaranteed half hour of coughing, hacking, and puking in an effort to evacuate it all from our lungs. The experience was fucking miserable.

So, it was with a heavy heart that I stripped down and put on my plugsuit. Shinji arrived a few minutes after me, and I made an effort not to look at them. Misato gestured, and I put down my head and climbed into the Eva plug.

"LCL levels stable, temperature nominal," the technician called out through the tinny connection in my helmet.

"Okay," Misato said. "Are you two ready?"

"Yeah, okay," Shinji said.

I answered wanly, "As ready as I'll ever be."

The pressurized spigots above our head burst to life, and the plug began to fill with the strange liquid. It was warm, viscous, sticky, and obviously biological in origin. It reminded me of blood, or, well, maybe even semen. It sprayed into my hair even as it lapped up against my ankles, and within a minute or two it was up to my stomach. As usual, that's when my body began to respond with pure terror. I tried to calm my heart, I tried to use some of the Zen training I'd learned, but nothing really helped. My heart raced a kilometer a minute and I could feel myself hyperventilating as my lungs struggled to fill themselves with the last remaining oxygen in the plug. I could feel my nails digging into the metamaterial of the plugsuit at my palms, scratching little holes in the fabric. I finally couldn't hold myself up out of the liquid any longer, and even though I was desperate to get it over with, my body held its breath of its own accord.

"She's freaking out, Misato," I dimly heard the technician say.

"Calm down, Asuka," Misato said soothingly. "It's okay. You're safe. You can breathe. Just breathe."

A few tears squeezed out of my eyes and joined the liquid that was sloshing around the bridge of my nose.

Misato continued, "You're safe, Asuka. I'm right here in the control room watching you and I can flush the plug at any moment. Your oxygen levels are fine. You can breathe. I promise you, you can breathe."

With an agonized puff of bubbles, I lost control and took my first breath of the terrible LCL. I coughed, sputtered, and then took another breath as my lungs desperately tried to expel the first. The sensation was raw, animal agony. Finally after another minute or two I started to breathe normally. The liquid was a lot thicker than air, but it was also more oxygenated, and though I wouldn't call the feeling strictly comfortable at least the blistering adrenaline of the initial descent into the LCL was starting to die down.

"Shinji is nominal," I heard the technician say. "Asuka's getting there. Her heartrate is down to 165 bpm. Blood pressure 145 over 115. High adrenaline. Oxygen levels normal."

I gulped LCL, trying to stabilize my breathing.

"That's it, Asuka, you're doing great," Misato said quietly.

I don't know why but I started to laugh, creating bubbles in the liquid. After a couple of minutes of fading hysteria, I finally started to feel like a real person again. I started to feel like I could do my job. I keyed open the comm with a subvocalized command.

"Okay, I'm ready to go," I announced.

Shinji came on shortly after. "Let's do it."

"Okay, Eva pilots. We're going to lower you into your Eva Units now," the technician advised.

There was a rattle and a thump as the crane grabbed our plugs, and the entire unit shuddered as I was slowly lowered into Unit-02. With a clang, the plugs were secured into the Evas.

"How are they doing?" Misato asked over the open channel.

"Shinji is nominal. Asuka is still high, but within acceptable levels. I believe we can proceed as is. They won't get time to acclimate in the middle of a battle after all."

"Okay. We're going to open the interlink. Get ready."

Unit-02 woke up. At least she wasn't as pissy as she was yesterday. Actually, she was acting quite strangely. As though she could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins, Unit-02 acquired a soothing demeanor. It was as though she was trying to say that I was safe and she loved me. At first, I tried to fight it. I didn't have a mother and I didn't need one.

"Sync rates: Shinji 14.7%, Asuka 13.1%," the technician announced.

Well, I wasn't going to let that asshole beat me for long. I decided to accept the tendril of compassion Unit-02 was offering. I let her into my mind.

"Oh wow!" Misato suddenly cried.

"Asuka, you're at 28.8%! Shit!" the technician announced eagerly.

Shinji's voice came over the channel. "Good job, Asuka."

"Let's just do this," I murmured into my throat mic.

For the next _three hours_, I breathed LCL and maneuvered Unit-02 alongside Shinji inside the live fire exercise room. We did everything that we might expect to have to do in combat, multiple times. With Shinji beside me, I did squats, push-ups, pull-ups, fell down in place and then stood up from multiple prone positions, and even fired my weapons at nothing at the directive of the engineers. To say it was fucking boring would have been an unnecessary compliment, because at least there's a fuck given _somewhere_ in that case. After we'd done every conceivable motion a hundred times, Misato finally gave us the go ahead to redock our Evas and prepare for evacuation from the plugs.

As usual, coming out of the LCL was almost as bad as getting drowned in it. I coughed, screamed, hacked, and barfed several times before I finally felt human again. The sticky fluid clung to my hair and dried in globules; it would be a miracle if I ever got it straightened out again after that. I was surprised when Misato leaned down and gave me a hug.

"I know it was tough, Asuka," she said. "You did really well today, and I'm proud of you."

I looked away.

"I don't need your pity," I rasped with irritated lungs.

"I wish you'd learn how to relate to other people," Misato said with a sigh.

She turned to Shinji and me with a strained smile.

"Go get showered up and I'll give you a ride home, okay?" she said.

"That'd be great," Shinji coughed.

I just hurried up to the girl's locker room and stripped off the awful plugsuit. For a half hour I scrubbed, lathered, scrubbed again, exfoliated, and louffaed, trying to get the awful smell of LCL off my body. I washed my hair twice and while I no longer stank to high heaven, I still had a faint odor of that strange liquid. Well, the best I could hope for was to cover it up with a little perfume. It would probably take two or three days of showering before I finally got free of the scent of the icky crap.

I dried off and dressed and met Shinji and Misato back at the car. We didn't talk much, though Misato reiterated how proud she was of both of us for working so hard. It's funny to think of all those executives who make millions and millions of dollars a year without going through a fraction of what we endure. When we got home, I scurried into the bathroom to take another shower, and when I felt human enough I went into my room and dressed in the new gothy dress I bought the day before. I haven't bothered with bras ever since reading about a French study that proved that when women wear bras, they don't build the proper musculature to hold their breasts up, and they end up getting droopy before their time. Besides, I don't see what I have to be ashamed of; men walk around shirtless all the time, don't they? When I was satisfied with my outfit, I decided to go to my favorite coffee shop and people watch for a little while in hopes of feeling human again.

"I'm going out," I announced while Misato and Shinji watched TV.

Misato looked up at me, and frowned.

"You're going to wear that?" she asked.

I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at her.

"Yeah? What about it?" I challenged.

"It's _cold_ out there, Asuka," she explained. "They're saying on the news it might snow tomorrow."

I snorted. "It's the middle of summer."

"I know. Something about what happened with the last Angel's A.T. Field messed up the jet stream. It's supposed to resolve itself in a few weeks, but for now, we're going to have winter weather in the middle of summer."

It's not that I didn't believe her, exactly, but I also wanted to see for myself. So I opened the door and stepped out onto the balcony of Misato's apartment. Almost immediately, I hurried back inside.

"Scheiße! It's cold out there! And all my winter clothes are in a closet in Bonn," I announced with a groan.

Misato paused the DVR, and I watched curiously when she returned with a heavy woolen coat from her own closet. She tossed it to me, and I was so surprised I almost didn't catch it.

"You can borrow this until the weather returns to normal," she explained.

I was taken aback by her gesture.

"Um," I said, fiddling with the lapel on the heavy pea coat. "Thanks, Misato."

"Dinner's in a couple hours. If you're going to be home, we're having sea bream au Misato," she said with a grin.

I smiled. Misato was a terrible cook.

"Okay, I'll be home."

"My" coffee shop was only three blocks from Misato's apartment. I abhorred Starbucks, with its burned coffee that tasted like high fructose syruped ass, so I patronized a shop that served European style coffee instead. Misato was right, it was freaking cold outside, and even with her heavy coat I still hurried to keep the blood pumping through my chilly extremities. Miyuki, the owner's daughter, greeted me with a wave.

"Hey, Asuka! The usual?"

"Sure," I answered. "Only half a shot of espresso, please; I've got to get to sleep some time tonight."

The coffee shop was busier than usual; I guess people wanted to get a warm cuppa to hide from the unexpected cold. Miyuki brought me a steaming cup of cappuccino and I tossed her a New Yen bill that would cover the drink and a generous tip. I watched the people come and go over the rim of my cup. It was obvious that I wasn't the only one who'd been caught flatfooted by the cold, because a lot of the patrons were wearing summer school uniforms or simple jean and t-shirt combos. They must be freezing their nuts off out there.

I returned home in time for dinner. I carefully hung Misato's coat on the rack in my room and then sat at the table. As usual, Misato's cooking left something to be desired, but it was obvious she tried so I complimented her anyway. After dinner we all sat in front of the television and watched a DVRed Japanese game show. I'll admit, of all Japanese TV the game shows get me the most. For such a typically polite and taciturn people, they seem willing to do the most outlandishly embarrassing and ridiculous things the moment you focus on them with a television camera. It'd been a long day so I returned to my room early. Before climbing into bed, I booted up my computer and scratched a common human itch. When I was finally sated, I crashed on my futon and didn't even have enough time to complain about Japanese furniture before falling asleep.

**End Chapter-01**


	3. 02 - Grimoire Nanotechnologique

**Chapter -02: Grimoire Nanotechnologique**

The cold weather dragged on for weeks, despite the meteorologists and Angelographers insistance that it would soon clear up. Our school moved us onto winter uniforms for the duration of the crisis, and the news was filled of stories from rural Japan of widespread damage the unexpected winter was doing to Japanese agriculture. United Korea, China, and even Australia were all feeling the pinch. It snowed heavily on summer solstice. Excited youngsers played in the street on that day, throwing snowballs at one another and building toy igloos and snowmen.

Stupid children never understand the significance of anything.

The freeze finally passed, though it still felt like November in August. One day, NERV dismissed us from our afterschool duties; apparently, the higher-ups were having a tiff, and they didn't want us pilots around until they got it resolved. I decided I was going to make a demand of Misato that had been building up in my heart for some time now, but first, I had to butter her up by cooking her dinner. After school, I got off the train a stop early without saying a word to Shinji, and I walked past Tokyo-3's omnipresent grocery chain – 7-11. Since Misato's fridge is 90% beer and 10% sad, wilted vegetables and expired yoghurt, I headed to a niche greengrocer that sold only organic and pesticide-free vegetables.

"Can I help you, miss?" an old, seemingly kindly Japanese man asked.

Ugh, I hate it when the help tries to talk to me.

"No, I'll find everything myself," I answered as politely as I could.

Ratatouille might be Provençal cuisine instead of Westphalian, but it's one of my personal favorites anyway. I meticulously selected the best-looking garlic, tomatoes, zucchini, red bell peppers, and aubergine and brought my wicker basket up to the register.

"Did you find everything okay?"

"Yes, yes," I answered with a dismissive wave.

He grunted, and ran my produce through a truly ancient register and scale combination. After the worldwide catastrophe of the Second Impact and the idiotic wars that followed, humanity had been decimated, taking a tenth of our wealth away along with all the vanished lives. Everything but the most advanced government projects was always in need of a new coat of paint, or updated hardware, or a solid hour of miticulous cleaning. My father and I were lucky; most of our investments were in Germany, and though the sea did extensive damage in the north and the Rhine had flooded through Bonn itself, we largely came through with our wealth and household intact. A lot of people hadn't been so lucky. I _did_ have to step inside a 7-11 on the way home to get a small bottle of my secret ingredient, but that will come later.

Shinji was playing video games, and he looked up at me curiously when I came in the door.

"Where did you disappear off to?"

I just shrugged.

"Whatever." He went back to his game.

I texted Misato and asked when she would get home, and then went into the kitchen and got to work on the ratatouille. Even though it's technically servant's work, I actually like cooking. All of the chopping and dicing and stirring and tasting soothes me somehow. It's so unlike losing myself to the alien mind of Unit-02; cooking is so primal and human at its most basic level. No matter how much the technology of cooking changes, from camp fires to microwaves, it's something that reminds us both of our animal nature and the fact that we transcend that nature in everything that we do. A river might overflow its banks, tear up a field of vegetables, and leave a pile of rotting garlic and celery when it recedes, but a river will never, ever create a meal. Misato finally got back to me; NERV was bringing in some independent contractors, and work was halted until the upstairs deliberations could be completed. She was just about to leave HQ so I got the vegetables cooking in the cast iron, carefully eyeballing the relative times. Shinji, useless as ever, just played on.

"Whoa, what smells so good?" asked Misato when she walked in the door.

"I'm cooking dinner," I announced. "Why don't you grab a beer and take a seat somewhere?"

Misato wandered into the kitchen.

"Hey, thanks. What brought this on?" she asked, gesturing to the cast iron.

I decided not to lay it on her until she'd had a couple beers, but no more. A little bit of alcohol tended to make her pliable, but when she got past tipsy and into truly drunk, she could become as hardheaded as playful.

"Oh, nothing much," I lied. "I wanted to ask you about something later but for now why don't you just relax?"

Misato obediently grabbed a beer and took a seat in the living room with Shinji. I could hear her offering him backseat advice in whatever game he was playing, and I knew it must be driving him to distraction to have her watching over his shoulder. I went back to the ratatouille, which was coming along nicely. Cooking aubergine is a dangerous gamble. It has a narrow band of being done just right, and if you undercook it it's rubbery, and if you overcook it, it soon becomes intolerably mushy. I picked out a cube with chopsticks and gave it an experimental bite, and deeming it almost ready, I mixed in the rest of the vegetables along with tomato paste and my secret ingredient. Japanese people are used to vinegary flavors, of course, and they even eat things like soy-soaked fish for breakfast. And naturally they're used to spicy, peppery flavor, though usually in the form of wasabi. Nevertheless, I found that Tabasco sauce continually inspired delighted surprise. I'd developed a taste for it when I lived in Los Angeles, and I didn't hesitate to invent new opportunities to use it.

"Smells good!" Misato called into the kitchen. "What are you making, Asuka?"

"Ratatouille."

I could practically hear her mentally struggle with the word.

"Ra-ta-to-ri?"

"Close enough." I gave the cast iron a good shake. "It's Occitan, from the southwestern part of France. Stewed vegetables but I think you'll find it has a particular touch that makes it one of Europe's finest dishes. Anyway, it's almost ready, so why don't you two come to the table?"

They came into the kitchen, and Misato shot Shinji a look.

"Shinji! Asuka's cooking, so why don't you set the table?" she prompted while leaving little room for disagreement.

Shinji obediently set the table, and I smiled when he laid out chopsticks beside the plates. There was something funny to me about people eating ra-ta-to-ri with the traditionally Japanese utensils, but I held my tongue. Soon the vegetables were crackling in the pan, and after another taste, I deemed it ready to be served. I spooned some out for Misato, then Shinji, then myself, and then took my seat at the table.

"Itadakimas!" we announced in unsion, and then began to eat.

"Mm, Asuka, this is quite good," Misato soon announced. "Where did you learn to cook like this?"

I shrugged. "Even before the Second Impact, my father was very sensitive to changes in the world. He wanted me to learn from an early age to do simple things like cooking, even though we had servants to do it for us. He suspected, I suppose, that the good times couldn't last forever and that basic skills like cooking could come in handy at any time."

"It's not bad, Asuka," Shinji said.

I could never understand what that boy was thinking.

I dug in, and was pleased with the result. I didn't fumble with my chopsticks at all; the moment I learned I was being sent to Japan along with Unit-02, I'd done everything I could to immerse myself in Japanese language and culture. I could wield chopsticks like a pro, and if I'm being strictly honest, I think the Japanese custom of drinking soup straight from the bowl is the only solution that makes any sense. I mean, messing around with spoons is idiotic, where did we learn that rule!?

"Misato, what's going on at NERV?" Shinji asked.

Misato sighed and chugged the rest of her beer before she answered. I surreptitiously got her another while listening to her story.

"Well to put it simply, your father, NERV's sponsors, those stupid computers, and the Eva technicians all have different ideas of how we should develop their combat capabilities. As far as I know, your father is trying to convince the engineers to improve their operating time even at the expense of unit mobility. They're constantly debating figures and likely tactical scenarios, and of course, nobody asks or tells me anything," she said with a sigh.

"What do you think they should do?" Shinji asked.

Misato cracked the can and took another gulp.

"I guess I think that no matter what they choose, ensuring the safety of the pilots should be paramount," she finally answered.

I shook my head. "Isn't that unnecessary? All that matters is destroying the Angels. As the Eva pilots, we're the only people who can or should take our own safety into consideration. If we're good enough we'll live. If we're not good enough, we'll die."

"Asuka! Don't be so blasé about things like that!" Misato objected.

I put my hands on my hips and spoke confidently. "I'm _not_ going to lose."

Shinji just stared at his hands. I looked carefully at Misato's face, and judged her flushed enough to drop the bomb.

"Misato, I want a car."

She looked up at me. "What?"

"You know, a car. I'm tired of being stuck on the train and I think that as an Eva pilot, getting me a car is the _least_ the government can do."

"Sorry Asuka. Nothing doing."

"What!?" I was furious. "That's ridiculous! You trust me with a fifty ton weapons platform and you won't trust me with a fucking automobile?"

Misato steeled herself. "It's not about whether or not I trust you, Asuka. It would just complicate things too much."

Shinji wordlessly got up and went back to his video game.

"How would it complicate things!?" I demanded. "In fact, it would make things easier. If I always had a car I wouldn't have to wait for you or a train to take me to NERV HQ in the event of an emergency. _Lives_ could be at stake, Misato, lives that could be saved if it didn't take me an extra 15 minutes to get suited up at HQ!"

I found myself breathing hard.

"Lives could also be lost, Asuka. Think about it. Let's say we _do_ get you a special government license to drive. Do you think every local cop is going to believe you're really the infamous Eva pilot? They'll just assume you're some bratty kid with a fake ID out for a joyride in your mom's car! I can't be calling every local police station every time there's an emergency in case you've been busted for driving underage."

"Are all Japanese that stupid!?" I demanded angrily.

"Damn it, Asuka. I'm sorry but no means no."

I slammed the table with my hands and got up.

"You're so pigheaded, Misato! You _always_ assume I'm going to get myself in trouble!"

I could see her struggling to swallow her own anger, but so what? _She_ can drive wherever she wants, and her responsibilities are _nothing like _the ones I have to bear. It's fucking ridiculous.

"Asuka, things can't always go your way. There are things you have to think about as an adult that you don't recognize when you're a teenager."

"Fuck that and fuck_ you_, Misato!"

I stormed out of the kitchen and almost inadvertently kicked Pen Pen in my fury. The bird squeaked and looked up at me piteously, and I felt a sudden stab of remorse that I'd almost hurt the little creature. I squatted down so I could look at the penguin on its own level.

"Sorry about that, Pen Pen. I didn't see you there," I explained, giving the bird a hug.

He chirped, and I think he forgave me. I got back up and continued my furious stomp to my room, slamming the door after I made a careful check that the bird was clear. I don't know why, but I found myself suddenly sobbing, I cried quietly into my pillow, torn between anger and impotence. How many lives did I have to save before these idiots stopped treating me like a child?

The next morning, I walked out of the door without saying a word to Misato. She looked like she wanted to stop me, but instead, she let me walk out of the door without getting in my way. School was shitty, of course, and I wondered when I'd be proficient enough with Kanji that I could just stop attending no matter what the dumb bitch said. After all, no one was going to stop me from saving the world. I successfully avoided everyone at lunch, and then Shinji and I were called into NERV HQ for yet another series of tests. Misato met us at the train station and walked us into the building.

"Well, the good news is you won't have to get a lungful of LCL today," Misato explained. "And more good news – Rei is going to join you on this exercise."

I still wasn't talking to her, so Shinji asked, "What's the bad news?"

"The bad news is you won't be working with Units 00, 01, or 02. For this exercise we have specially constructed units called 'Simulation Bodies' that are designed to roughly simulate the experience of piloting an Eva."

Since Rei has no soul, she also has no aura, so I didn't notice when she suddenly appeared beside Shinji and me. I pretended that she didn't exist.

"Why the change?" asked Shinji.

"I'll explain more about that in a minute." Misato looked troubled. "At any rate, follow me to the Clean Room."

We rode the elevator down a dozen floors, and I kept my arms crossed the entire time. I was still pissed at Misato for getting in my way about the car, but I wasn't going to let that effect my professionalism. But that still didn't mean I had to like her.

"Okay, you three. You're not going to like this, but I need you to take off your clothes."

I was so startled I forgot I wasn't talking to Misato. "What? All of them!?"

"The Magi are suggesting that the plugsuits might be getting in the way of better synchronization rates. They wanted to test it and Gendo gave the go-ahead. So, the long and short of it is, we need you to be naked for this exercise."

"Ugh," I groaned.

I didn't really care about Rei – she was just an appliance – but Misato was demanding I let Shinji see, you know, everything?

Naturally, Rei stripped down without a moment's hesitation. I found it disgusting that they gave that thing such a human appearance. Did they really have to mold her to so closely resemble a real human girl? Shinji hesitatingly stripped off his shirt, but I stood resolute.

"Look, Asuka, I know you don't want to do this," Misato said. "But it might have an impact on your combat efficiency, and if that's true, we need to find out. Please, please, please just go with it, okay?"

I sighed. "Oh well. Shinji's no more than a dog and I guess I wouldn't mind if a dog saw me naked."

Obediently, we stripped down until we were as naked as Rei. The robot-minded girl didn't seem to notice that she, or anyone else was standing there totally in the buff. As for Shinji, I guess he thought I didn't notice his occasional glances my way, but I just glared at him.

"Okay, please go ahead and enter the decontamination chamber," Misato said. "We need to get you three as clean as technology will make you."

It wasn't as bad as LCL immersion, but getting decontaminated sucked. It was like the delousing scene from the Shawshank Redemption, only a whole lot worse. Men in moonsuits sprayed us down with high pressure hoses, doused us with foam, scoured us with UV wands, and generally got into every nook and cranny of our bodies without even buying us dinner first. Misato didn't ask them to give me an enema, but they practically did anyway with that high pressure jet of water. I groaned; I don't think I'll sit right for a week after that. Finally the moon men herded us out into NERV's clean zone. I looked up at the camera with a glare.

"Well, it's like you wanted! Washed and cleaned seventeen times!" I yelled at the device.

Another technician, Ritsuko, came over the speakers.

"Now, all three of you pass through this room and climb into your entry plugs," she said.

"What!?" I demanded.

Everyone in the goddamn control room could see us over the video uplink.

Ritsuko said, "Don't worry, we'll cut the monitors. Your privacy is protected."

"That's not the point," I muttered. "The point is how I feel about it."

"The point of this exercise is to test how the harmonics of your body effect the synchronization, without interference from the plugsuit," Ritsuko needlessly explained.

Misato cut in. "Asuka, just do it! That's an order."

"Oooookay," I groaned. "Just don't watch."

So the three of us entered the next room, where the test plugs were online and waiting for us. I quickly climbed in and sealed the door behind me, wanting to show Shinji as little of my body as possible. I pulled the synchronization helmet over my head and waited impatiently for the test to start. I wanted to get some clothes back on as soon as possible.

"Okay," a male technician's voice came over my comm. "This test should last about three hours."

The HUD burst to life, and I felt myself being drawn forward, as though the sensation of falling asleep. Immediately, I could tell that something was different about these simulation bodies when compared to my own Unit-02. They seemed like pathetic half-made things, and the normally strong sensation of psychic connection was weak, and dissolute. I could hardly feel anything at all.

"How are you feeling?" Ritsuko asked.

Rei replied, "Something is different."

"Yes," agreed Shinji. "Something is different from the other times."

I decided to contribute. "My senses are all muddy. My right arm seems clear, but everything else is just a blur."

In the control room, they ran us through a series of exercises, trying to pin down what the problem was. I found it difficult to concentrate. It was like trying to reach out and grab something slippery in the shower, or maybe, to see even though my eyes were closed. It was an uncomfortable sensation and I didn't look forward to spending three hours in this half-conscious state. We continued testing basic things, like trying to move arms or legs. Rei clearly had some kind of problem when she tried to move her arm but nobody over the comm would explain what it was. I thought I was going to die of bored exhaustion, or exhausted boredom, when suddenly an alarm went off.

"What the Hell is that?" I demanded, a sentiment soon echoed by Shinji and Rei.

"Something is wrong!" Ritsuko sounded panicked. "Abort the test!"

Misato asked, "How's Rei?"

"What is going on!?" I asked, but nobody was paying any attention to me.

"Rei's simulation body is moving all on its own! Damn it, eject the plugs now!" Ritsuko cried.

"What the fuck, what the fuck!?" I demanded over the comm.

"Ritsuko, cut Asuka's mic," Misato ordered.

"Hey, don't cut my fucking mic!" I screamed, but it was no use; I was talking to dead air.

There was a loud clang as they ejected us from the simulation bodies, and my HUD went dead. I stripped off my helmet and tried to force open the test plug door, but it was sealed from the outside, and I couldn't get it open. I was seriously furious. I can't believe they cut me off from – whatever was going on outside. I could hear occasional clangs and loud noises, and I tried to swallow my growing panic. What was going on outside? If something really bad happened, would I be trapped inside this test plug until I died of asphyxiation, or thirst?! Without my plugsuit, or the body temperature LCL to keep me warm, the plug was a little chilly inside, and I curled up trying to preserve heat. I admit it, I was really scared. I had no idea what was going on and for some reason our communications uplink had also been severed. For all I knew, there might be an Angel attacking outside, and I was helpless to even get out of the test plug.

It was an interminable length of time before I felt my plug being dragged back onto the side of the artificial lake where we were floating. I was so relieved; I was really starting to wonder if I was going to die in there. I was almost happy to see Misato's smiling face when she opened the door to my plug from the outside. I quickly covered my breasts and down below.

"Aiye!" I cried. "Can't you get me some clothes?"

Misato sent Shinji and I home without giving us much explanation of what had happened. All she told us was that another Angel, designation Ireul, had attacked and been stopped inside the computer system. I wasn't sure how an Angel had managed to infect _computers_, but Misato reassured us that even if we'd been in our Evangelion, we wouldn't have been able to do anything to help. Somewhat mollified, Shinji and I caught a train back to Misato's apartment. As for Rei, who knew where she went at the end of the exercise; I can only assume they plugged her back in to whatever outlet they kept her hooked up to when she wasn't in use. Shinji got off at the stop that led to Misato's apartment, but I was suddenly tired of feeling cooped up, so I waved him goodbye and stayed on the train platform.

[AUTHOR: This section's been moved. I thought it was a bit much to hit people with right out of the gate, so please bear with me! I did warn y'all it was incomplete. Plus, I think it works better here; Asuka's feeling weird and vulnerable after having to wander around NERV naked all day.]

I boarded the next train heading in the opposite direction and I got off when I felt like I'd put enough space between myself and NERV HQ. I found myself in the run-down section of town, where people couldn't afford to be on the main Tokyo-3 plate. Whenever an Angel attacked, these people fled to ramshackle bunkers and often lost their entire livelihood, and occasionally their lives. In short, they were broke, desperate, and despondent.

A few people looked up at me with casual, and not-so-casual glances. I wasted no time in searching out a liquor store, and I found one being run out of a boarded up house that looked like it was barely standing upright. The proprietor was less happy to see me than I expected.

"How old are you, miss?" he asked slowly, as if I didn't understand Japanese.

"Nineteen," I lied easily.

He gave me a dubious once over, paying more attention than was strictly necessary to my breasts.

"Have any ID?" he asked.

"ID!?" I was legitimately flummoxed. "My god, man, you manage to live out here turning half your pretty girl customers away?"

He raised his hands. "Look, miss, I don't want any trouble. The police don't bother with me none just so long as I make a passing wink at the law, you got it? If you don't have ID, I'm gonna have to turn you away."

"I'll pay you twice what the bottle's worth," I tried.

"Nothing doing. I'm sorry, please come back when you have ID."

Irritated, I turned and stormed out of the building. I was strongly considering giving up, raiding Misato's stash and then justifying myself later, but then I spied a disheveled looking man drinking out of a paper bag next to the store. I sidled over to him while he watched me in a haze of liquor, confusion, and desire.

"I need a favor," I said in my sultriest voice.

He eyed me. "What?"

"I wanted to buy a bottle of wine, but I forgot my ID at home. Do you think maybe you could help me out?"

"What's in it for me?" he asked with a leer.

I shrugged. "I'll pay you an extra two hundred New Yen."

He smirked. I wasn't sure I liked his look.

"I don't want your money. But maybe you could offer something else I'd be interested in?"

I got his message, and I immediately felt repulsed. But, truth be told, my heart was pounding in my chest. Being an adult means being resourceful and getting what you want. My ears were burning.

"I'll give you a handjob," I blurted before I even knew what I was saying.

"And the money."

"O-okay. Just get me a bottle of red wine. From Germany, if you please."

I handed him the money, and he took it with a cruel smile. I stood in the alley and waited while my heart seemed like it was going to thunder out of my chest. What was I doing? Did I really want my first experience like that to be with a total stranger and for nothing more than a little booze? On the other hand, it would prove once and for all that I didn't need Misato for anything, not even the occasional drink. I squirmed as I thought this, but there was one other thing, too. I could die at any hour of any day. I put my life in harm's way, to help others.

Did I really want to go to my grave without ever even seeing - you know - a male part? I don't mean on the internet or something; but a real, living, breathing man in all his glory?

It didn't take the guy long to return from the building, a paper bag in hand. I quickly checked the contents before nodding once in satisfaction.

"It'll do," I said.

"What about the rest of my payment?" he asked, unzipping his Western-style jeans.

Blood thundered in my eardrums, and I reached down and gently freed his thing from inside of his boxers. Unsure of myself, I grabbed it. I was surprised by how rubbery and hairy it was, and underneath the supple skin it surprised me by feeling like a powerful muscle. It leaped between my fingers, and the man involuntarily thrust as I started to tug.

"Ow! Not so hard," he hissed.

I released my death grip a little, and the man finally started to moan with pleasure. I was humiliated. This was, without a doubt, the most degrading thing I'd ever done in my entire life. And yet, there was something satisfying about it too. The man smelled like grease, sweat, and stale liquour. It was strange being out in the open where anyone could see, but nobody walked by while I continued to stroke the hard organ. Before I knew it, he was suddenly coming, and hot, sticky liquid squirted out of the tip of his cock and dripped all into my hands. He groaned in ecstasy while I dropped it like a live snake and started shaking some of the viscous fluid off my hand.

"Now get out of here, you dumb slut," the man barked.

I felt a strange hormonal high as I picked up my bottle and hurried away. Was it true? Was I really a slut now? As awful as it seemed, to tell the truth, I felt strangely liberated by the accusation. If I was a slut it didn't matter anymore; if I was a slut, I no longer had any virtue to defend. I started to giggle with suppressed nervousness and the idea that one more painful, oppressive weight was lifted from my shoulders. If I was really a slut, I no longer had to try to be a saint ever again.

I got some tissues out of my purse and wiped up as much of the drying, thick semen as I could. I dropped the wet rags in a nearby trash can, and stuffed the wine bottle into my purse. I got back on the train with my prize and headed back to Misato's apartment. Shinji looked up at me with an oddly guilty face as he turned off the television.

"What?" I demanded.

"Sorry. I was just about to go to bed, and then you came in the door." He laughed a little self-deprecatingly. "It just made me feel a little self-conscious. I didn't want you to think that I was trying to avoid you."

"Go to bed, Ikari Shinji. It's not like I'd care!"

I ended up drinking the entire bottle of wine while watching Japanese television. With the determination of the truly drunk, I was going to get the whole story about what happened at NERV out of Misato, come Hell or high water. But even though I stayed up to 0300 hours, she didn't come home.

**End Chapter-02**


	4. 03 - Truths Worse than Lies

**Chapter-03:**

Class is BORING.

I know I've made that point before, but seriously! I can't believe how boring it is to listen to the teachers reiterate the same points over and over again. If you can't understand the first time that the Roman Empire collapsed due to overtaxation, military overextension, and a corrupt and litigious senate, what are you doing in high school? A stable would suit you better.

I doodled idly on my tablet while the teacher babbled on. I was surprised to discover that I'd been writing Kaji's name over and over and over. Funny, that. I guess it is fair to say that I like him. It's true that he's a little bit older than me, but that actually makes him all the more interesting. The guys my age are idiots with no understanding of the real world. They're just a bunch video-game playing bums with no jobs and no prospects for the future. In contrast, Kaji is a highly-placed NERV agent with a roguish and mysterious charm, and something about his demeanor makes me want to sneak into his room and find out what he's hiding. I resolved to call him up during lunch, to make sure he doesn't forget about me.

Blah Nero blah Claudius blah Caligula blah Tiberius. Maybe if we were studying something I didn't already know, like ancient Chinese history, I wouldn't find the class so dull - but I already took all this stuff in _university_ so what's the point of reiterating it in high school? I looked for an explanation as for why the gods might be subjecting me to this torment. Maybe I died in the last Eva battle. Maybe I died, and everything since then has been an illusion in Purgatory. I wonder how I could test that hypothesis…?

Lunch came. I ate a cheese Danish and drank an iced coffee. It was warm again, and there were only a few students goofing off in the west field, so I went there to try to ring up Kaji.

The phone rang eight times, and, to my fury, the line put me through to voicemail. How dare he ignore me? Doesn't he realize that I've been busy _saving the world_; for fuck's sake, he could give me the simple courtesy of actually _talking_ to me. I decided to play a cruel prank on him to get revenge for his inattention.

"Help! Kaji, help!" I hissed into his voicemail. "Some guy found me behind the building and I don't like the way he's looking at me! He's coming this way come quick!"

I killed the call. Let Kaji chew on that for awhile; I hope he worries himself to death.

After lunch, it was time for science. Our science teacher was obviously still hungover.

"Ersh, it's too bright in here," she muttered first thing when she walked into our room.

She dimmed the lights, put a movie about frogs on the classroom projector, and fell asleep behind her desk. Of course, we students used this as an opportunity to talk and socialize. I was surprised when Hikari came over to my desk.

As a fellow student Hikari is surprisingly tolerable. I mean, she's not a genius on my level or anything, but she's smart, gregarious, and sometimes even manages to make me crack a smile. She pulled up a chair with a serious look on her face, and I gazed back at her curiously.

"Hey, Hikari. What's up?"

She seemed a little nervous, so I prodded her some more. "Is there something you wanted to ask?"

"Um, Asuka, don't get mad or anything, but I was hoping you could do me a favor."

I shrugged. "Depends on what it is."

"My sister has this friend, and I really think you should meet him."

"Him?" I was cautious.

"You know, like, go on a date. I know this is kind of out of the blue, but I think you two would really hit it off! He's tall, and cute; he's really good at tennis and he's already in med school. He's been all over the world so he has a lot of experience with different kinds of people." Hikari could tell I was skeptical, but she powered through it anyway. "I'd ask him out myself but I know he's way out of my league. But I'll bet you'd really enjoy yourself if you went out on a date."

"I don't know, Hikari…" I said. "It feels weird to go on a date with someone before you even get to meet them."

"You'll hit it off, honest! You two are both funny and travelled and cynical. Besides, it would be doing me a huge favor. My sister is really crushing on him hopelessly but he isn't interested in her like that. If he got a girlfriend, maybe she'd be able to get over him and move on with her life. It would really mean a lot to me if you said yes, Asuka."

I sighed. "Oh, alright."

"Thanks!" Hikari beamed. "Are you free tomorrow night?"

"I have to say, I feel like you're planning my whole life for me…"

"Oh, don't be a stick in the mud, Asuka. If you don't have a good time you can vow to never forgive me for it!"

"Okay, okay, you win," I groaned.

"Okay, I'll have him text you tomorrow."

I turned my attention back to the documentary about frogs. Naturally, I didn't learn anything new, but at least the images were compelling. Our classroom's 4k projector made the little amphibians look so real that I almost felt like I could reach out and touch them. After the film strip ended, the science teacher just pretended class was over until she was relieved by our English teacher. Why can't I get excused from this class!? I lived in America for years and speak excellent English!

I texted Misato and told her that I had a date the next day. After all, that's more than _she_ was ever going to get a chance to say again. Who would date that drunken, stupid impediment to all human advancement? I let her chew on her jealousy while I dicked around on my phone. I was surprised when she texted me back saying "Congratulations;" after all, she's not normally the type to know when she's been bested.

Class got out; I went home; what more is there to say? Shinji went into his room and locked the door. Only the kami know what he's doing in there, and I for one don't care much to speculate. I decided to anesthetize myself with bad television and cheap ramen, both of which were amply available in Misato's apartment. I watched some game show that largely seemed to consist of Japanese people doing stupid and mildly dangerous stunts for points, and though I can't say it was particularly edifying, it certainly was entertaining. Is there anything in the world more fun than seeing a Japanese person get hit in the face with a high-velocity soccer ball? It's like a tiramisù of slapstick comedy, social commentary, and comparative cultural studies.

I gave into a guilty pleasure and turned the TV to computer input, and put on the news out of Berlin. It'd been far too long since I'd heard the German language spoken. Yes, Japan, consonant clusters are real things. You _can_ put together p and f, or t and r, or s and k. You'd think they were being choked to death by their own larynxes when you hear them struggle with the simplest sounds. I know a lot of people think the German language sounds inelegant, but that's just the result of ignorance. It's fun to put words together like legos, and as long as the glottals aren't needlessly exaggerated, it even sounds melodious in its competent execution. The German news was mostly about corporate takeovers, the Chancellery election, and tensions with Ukraine, though I was pleased to see a short blip about Yours Truly. Whenever an Angel attacked it was the biggest news in the world, quite naturally, but it was funny to see the news back home occasionally following me in my studies as long as they retained a respectful distance. I guess I'm something of a national hero in Germany; for various historical reasons, it does a lot to ease the Teutonic psyche to have someone selflessly exemplifying German heroics to the entire world.

After I got bored with that, I put on some video games. I normally hate how repetitive they are but once in awhile I'll indulge. I like the classics the best, like the original Super Mario Bros, before game design traded elegance and simplicity for blockbuster special effects. I was mildly unconcerned that Shinji hadn't even showed his face for dinner yet. Nobody can masturbate for that long. Oh, right – he's supposed to talk to his father tomorrow. That kid has a serious complex about the whole thing. While Shinji mopes about feeling put-on and abandoned, his father is out doing real work that gets us the tools we need to make a stand against the Angels. If you ask me, Shinji should be a little more grateful, and he has no right to try to monopolize his fathers' attention just because he's a lonely little child. He should try getting a girlfriend, or something.

Hikari's sister's friend, Akira, texted me at 1900 hours. He was nice enough at least to ask me where I wanted to go. I thought about it.

_How about Tokyo Dome_, I asked, referring to a large boardwalk that had several roller coasters and cheap carnival food.

**Sounds good to me**, he replied. **Meet you there noon?**

_Sure._

******How will I recognize you?**

I had to laugh to myself.

_I'll be the tall German girl with long red hair._

**Oh. Well Hikari did promise that you'd be cute.**

I shifted on the couch. This was getting entirely too personal.

_I have to go. I'll see you tomorrow in front of the Venus Lagoon_, I texted, referring to the famous merry-go-round.

**OK see you then.**

I got bored with Mario Bros and went back to TV. Sometimes it's a little exhausting to be me. I didn't want to go to sleep, but I was already hopelessly bored with all of the entertainment options available to me. I could go out, but it was down to less than five degrees outside and I didn't feel like getting bundled up. Instead, I lounged on the couch like a complete bum, occasionally stuffing a cracker into my mouth. After several thoroughly wasted hours, I heard the door to Misato's apartment click open and then Misato herself came in. She was carrying an elaborate dress protected by a vinyl bag.

"Oh, Asuka," she said, hanging up her coat. "What are you still doing up? Don't you have a date tomorrow?"

I shrugged. "It's just some med student."

"Where's Shinji?"

"In his room, sulking about his father. You know, the usual. Oh, I wanted to ask you something."

Misato eyed me warily. I tried not to roll my eyes; it's not like I ask ridiculous things.

"I was hoping I could borrow a bit of your Lavender perfume for my date tomorrow. Since he's so much older than me, I want to be able to impress him."

Misato's eyes darkened. "I think you're a little young for such a strong scent."

"Whatever. It was foolish to think I'd want to smell like you, anyway."

"I'm going to go talk to Shinji," Misato said.

I waved her off. That was fine by me; it was clear Misato was being a drama llama about something and it may as well be left to Shinji to deal with her. I decided to perform a strategic withdrawal to my own room, where hopefully the pair of them would leave me alone. Pen Pen waddled by and I smiled at the diminutive creature; he's the only person in this whole damn apartment who isn't an irredeemable pain in the ass. Well I mean, he and I. I argued with some conspiracy theorists online, under a pseudonym of course. I couldn't help but smile at some of the more outlandish speculations. There was a man in Houston absolutely convinced I was an alien, while there was a well-represented faction who argued that the Eva pilots didn't exist at all and that the machines were basically uncontrolled beasts narrowly commanded by the UN government. You didn't have to go far to read people claiming that the Angels didn't exist, that the Second Impact had been caused by NERV itself, that the Second Impact had never even happened(!), that we were all already dead, and other, even more outlandish theories. There was even a group who thought the entire website was run by the UN to spread disinformation. I don't know about that, myself, but somehow I wouldn't be surprised.

The next morning, I had a light breakfast. I'm an Eva pilot and all so there's no way I'm going to get motion sickness on a roller coaster, but still, there's nothing fun about the sensation of a heavy breakfast sloshing around your stomach while you ride. I didn't want Akira to think I was trying too hard, so I put on a casual yellow tank top that was baggy enough to keep me from looking like a side of meat. I also didn't want him to think I wasn't trying at all, so for bottoms I chose short jean cut-offs that accentuated my long legs. I left for the train station without saying anything to the two idiots, though I did wave goodbye to Pen Pen. I'd like to believe he appreciates me.

I was only sitting on the bench in front of the Venus Lagoon for a minute before a thin, willowy Japanese man made his nervous way over to me. I waited for him to introduce himself first.

"I'm Akira. You must be Asuka?" he asked, surprisingly tentative considering I was the only tall German girl with red hair anywhere in sight.

"Yeah, I'm Asuka."

I stood up and shook his hand, Western-style. He seemed confused, and I was disgusted by his prissy handshake. Handshakes should be strong but not crushing; confident without being forceful. His was like a wilted leaf of lettuce, and I could already tell we probably wouldn't get along.

"You're very lovely. Thank you for meeting me here today," Akira mumbled.

I stopped myself from rolling my eyes just in time. "Did you bring any tickets?"

"Tickets?"

"You know, tickets for the rides?" I prompted.

"Oh, sorry. I don't know why, I just didn't think about it. I've been so busy with my anatomy group project that it's almost all I can think about; it's hard to get it out of my mind even though we already turned it in."

"Don't worry about it," I sighed. "Let's just go get in line."

Of course, since it was already twelve thirty all the families in Tokyo had enough time to get up and have a leisurely breakfast before coming to Tokyo Dome amusement park. So naturally the line of people waiting to purchase tickets from the kiosk seemed to lead all the way to Moscow and back. I groaned inwardly; aren't the guys supposed to do shit like this beforehand so the girl doesn't have to wait in line? But what was even worse was Akira's conversation. I could hardly get a word in edgewise because it seemed like all Akira wanted to talk about was himself.

"All two hundred and six," he said.

I blinked. "What?"

"All two hundred and six bones. I have to know all of their Latin names, exactly where they are in the body, and all the ligaments and tendons that connect them as well."

"Well, that's the whole point of being a doctor, isn't it? You don't want to be sewing someone's hand to their face because you don't know where anything is supposed to go."

"I'm not going to do _that_," he objected.

"I'm just saying. If I have to go in for surgery after a battle, I'm going to damn well want the doctor to know where all my _bones_ go."

Akira looked stricken. "You take this pretty seriously, don't you?"

"Well yeah. I'm not planning on losing or anything, but at the same time I've had a couple of close shaves that remind me that sooner or later, I might take a hit. And if that ever happens I'm going to want a doctor who knows what the Hell he's doing."

"I'm not saying that. All I'm saying is that it's a lot to memorize," he said with a sigh.

I shrugged. I had trouble feeling sympathy for the man. If he fucks up, someone might die. If I fuck up, _everyone_ might die.

Akira started a far-ranging lecture on topics ranging from ligaments to the pros and cons of herbal remedies, and I tuned him out as the line inched forward. Look, I don't mean to brag, but I had a degree from the Univerität Bonn by age fourteen, so it's not like I hate learning or anything. But standing there and getting lectured about something you have no interest in while you're on a date is absolutely unbelievable. I'm supposed to be having _fun_, guy, not learning obscure trivia about progressive ossifying myositis. We finally got to the front of the line, and I cut in front of Akira to buy a handful of tickets just so I wouldn't have to hear his voice ask.

"Are you sure you don't want me to get those?" he objected.

"Don't worry about it," I muttered. "I have an inheritance."

"What do you want to ride?" Akira asked after the cashier exchanged my New Yen for tickets.

"How about the Pixie Cups?"

He looked dubious. "Isn't that ride for kids?"

"Not when I'm doing the spinning," I answered with a wicked grin.

So, we got in line for the whirling tea cups. A super irritating song looped over the PA while we waited in line, and I wasn't sure what was worse, the repeating mp3 file or Akira's droning. He finally did ask me a few questions about myself, but I was tuned out enough to answer in monosyllables. How was being an Eva pilot? Meh. Was I afraid of combat? Nope. What did I think the Angels meant about mankind's place in the universe? *shrug*

When it was finally our turn, I dragged Akira into the nearest red cup and immediately tried turning the heavy circle that would spin the cup. Too bad – it was locked into place while the ride was still loading.

"You're not planning on spinning us very _fast_, are you Asuka?" Akira asked nervously.

"Of course. What's the point otherwise?"

"It's just… I sometimes get a little motion sick."

"You'll be _fine_," I insisted.

He looked at me with evident worry, and I resolved to spin the piss out of him. The ride operators yammered some useless safety instructions that I pointedly ignored, and then the ride finally jerked to life. Immediately, I grasped the circle in the center of the cup and started working up momentum. They say that a teenage girl is typically weaker than a guy, but there are certain exceptions to the rule, like if that teenage girl has had years of martial arts and hand-to-hand combat practice to go along with her university studies. I quickly worked the cup into a rapidly revolving blur, and I could hear Akira gulp protests through his constricted throat. That only spurred me to spin the cup faster.

I concentrated on the circle in front of me, and I only occasionally looked up to see the Tokyo Dome amusement park rapidly rotating in front of my eyes. Even as an Eva pilot I was starting to get dizzy; the human body simply wasn't meant to spin around so fast. Still, I wanted to stick it to Akira for making me listen to his nonsense for the past hour, so I continued to pull on the disc as fast as I could. Akira tried to make me slow down a couple times by jamming the disc with his hand, but he couldn't overcome the momentum I'd pulled into the transmission that ran the little pixie cup. I could barely understand the words coming out of the loudspeaker when the cup finally came to a halt, and I stumbled drunkenly onto the rotating platform that served the ride. I was so disoriented I couldn't even read the exit signs. I had to stumble blindly after the crowd and it felt like my eyes were spinning around inside my skull.

As soon as we got out of the ride enclosure, Akira leaned over a flowerbox and barfed directly into the bushes. Ugh. That absolutely tore it for me. Next chance I got, I was just going to ditch that idiot. Sorry, Hikari, I ain't even mad, but this date isn't for me if all he'll talk about is homework and he can't even endure a simple amusement park ride.

"Let's go on the Thunder Dolphin!" I urged, tugging at his flannel sleeve.

"Can't you give me a minute, Asuka?" he asked, stricken. "I told you I got motion sick…"

"Look, there's a long line, you can recover there!"

I helped him stumble over to the line that led to the coaster, and I handed him all the ride tickets I bought. May as well leave something for him to remember me by.

"Hey, I'm going to the bathroom, okay? Hold my place."

Akira nodded and tried not to vom again.  
I did feel kind of bad for ditching him, but honestly, I wasn't sure what to say to him. "Hey, you bore the shit out of me, it'll never work out?" No, I don't think so. And I was too tired to invent a stupid lie so I just bailed from the park. It can't always be a grand slam with ladies, and hopefully Akira will learn an important lesson about making the girl feel like her presence matters on the date too. I spent the next few hours in Tokyo-3 trying on a lot of clothes and buying nothing. I might be picky, but a lot of the stuff they have tailored to Japanese girls either doesn't fit me or just looks terrible when contrasted against my hair and eyes. I ate dinner out as well so I wouldn't have to explain myself to Misato, and after hanging out with Miyuki at the coffee shop for another hour, I finally returned home. I mean to Misato's apartment.

I was shocked by a tune coming out of Misato's hi-fi and it stopped me dead in my tracks after opening the door. I wasn't sure of the song, but it was deep, soulful, and melancholy in a way that really touched my heart. I wondered who was home listening to it so I carefully shut the door and followed the sound of the song to Shinji's open door. Imagine my amazement, imagine my total shock and confusion, when I discovered Shinji playing a cello and staring out of the window. I don't think he saw me come in so I kept quiet and listened to him continue playing. I found it almost impossible to believe that a dog like Shinji could create such beautiful music, but the evidence was right in front of me.

When he finally drew to a halt, the last echo of the vibrating strings still hanging in the air like static after a summer thunderstorm, I began to clap. Shinji turned and faced me. His face was painted with surprise and embarrassment.

"How long have you been standing there?" he asked.

"Long enough," I answered. "I never guessed you could play like that."

"Asuka…" he began.

Suddenly, the phone rang. Shinji answered it, and I went back into the living room and pretended not to eavesdrop.

"Oh… with Kaji? Okay, Misato. Okay, see you tomorrow."

I couldn't pretend any longer. "Shinji, what was that about?"

"Misato is out drinking with Kaji and she says not to wait up."

I growled involuntarily. Trust Misato to methodically crush my dreams, one after the other.

"Come over here, Shinji," I demanded suddenly.

Obediently he came over and sat next to me on the couch. "What is it, Asuka?"

"What game have you been playing recently?"

He shrugged. "Destiny 3."

"And is it for two players?"

"Sure. Why, do you want to play?"

I nodded. "Teach me."

The Playstation Whatever controller seemed almost as complicated as an Eva control board, but I got the hang of it faster than I expected. There was something more than a little ironic about being an Evangelion pilot protecting the world against an alien invasion playing a video game about being a mecha pilot protecting the world against an alien invasion, but I was enjoying myself anyway. We got through several checkpoints on campaign mode, and then we did a decent job against human-controlled enemies in PVP. Finally, I got bored and put the controller down on the coffee table.

My decision was totally spur of the moment.

"Hey, Shinji, want to kiss me?"

He blinked, unbelievingly.

"I'm bored," I explained. "You can kiss me, if you want."

He leaned across the couch and inexpertly mashed his lips into mine. I wasn't intended to let him get away so easily; if he wanted to kiss me, he was going to damn well get the full experience. I opened my lips and shoved my tongue into his mouth. I could smell his boyish scent, in his shirt, in his hair, on the skin of his cheek. He struggled against me but I refused to let him go. I tried working my tongue around in his mouth, searching for that secret that adults must have that makes the experience of French kissing pleasurable. He mumbled and tried to push me off, and when I was desperate for breath, I finally let him go. For a brief moment, we looked into each other's eyes.

And what I saw was nothing. Just the same dull, immature Ikari Shinji that I normally had every reason to dislike. He didn't even look turned on. Unbelievable. How could he share a long kiss with a girl as beautiful as me and obviously not feel anything at all? I quickly ran to the bathroom so I wouldn't have to look at his stupid face.

"Ugh! Gross!" I shrieked. "Fuck you, Ikari Shinji!"

I gargled copious amounts of mouthwash before coming back into the living room. Shinji was gone; he'd probably returned to his room to masturbate over the memory or something. I was about to go to bed when the door to Misato's apartment clicked open and none other than Ryoji Kaji himself stumbled in – supporting an absolutely shitfaced Misato on his shoulder.

"Sorry, kiddo," Kaji said with a hiccup. "I'm going to put this one to bed."

I pretended I didn't care and I took a seat at the kitchen table. In a few minutes, Kaji came back into the main room of the apartment.

"Kaji-kun, could you come here, please?" I asked nicely.

He eyed me dubiously, but he sat across the table from me anyway.

"What is it, Asuka?"

I had one more chance to salvage something worthwhile from this whole useless day.

"You should consider staying here tonight," I explained. "After all, it's very dangerous to drive drunk, and we're all commuting the same place tomorrow morning."

I couldn't read the look in his eyes.

"Sorry, Asuka," he soon said. "I really have to get home tonight."

I objected, "But you're _clearly_ drunk. If you get pulled over, you'll go to jail!"

"Thanks for the offer, but I think I'll see you tomorrow," Kaji groaned, standing up and pushing himself away from the table.

"Hey, wait!"

But it was too late. He was already headed out of the door.

As he left, I realized I could smell Misato's Lavender perfume lingering where he passed.

**End Chapter-03**

[AUTHOR:] Ho hum. I hope I'm not overly glorifying Asuka. Actually, I find her to be rather obnoxious and cunty. When I got the idea for this story, I was thinking about Mary Sues and self-insert fics… and I wondered what kind of fic would allow me to create something like that totally justifiable by canon. Asuka does kind of remind me of how I acted when I was her age, and that story about making her date throw up due to aggressive spinning on the tea cups is something I totally did to one of my exes once! It's interesting to me that for now, at least, she really _is_ better at just about everything than everyone she comes into contact with. She's just far too immature to know the value of personal relationships, which is a completely different kind of lesson than the ones you can excel in at school…


	5. 04 - The Razor's Edge

**Chapter-04: The Razor's Edge**

After school, just when Shinji, Rei, and I were about to reach the train platform that would take us home, we all got a call from HQ demanding our presence for yet another synchronization test. Annoying, sure, but as long as we weren't going to get drowned in LCL I guess it could be a lot worse. The numbers jockeys at NERV were just _bananas_ for synchronization tests. They couldn't get enough of them. Test your synchronization rate standing up. Test your synchronization rate sitting down. Test your synchronization rate after being knocked prone by a specially-designed lifting arm. Test your synchronization rate while hopping on one foot and listing the Japanese prime ministers in reverse chronological order.

Still, I joined the three on the train that would take us to NERV without much complaint. Being an Evangelion pilot means everything to me; it's the most important part of who I am. I'm not the first girl to get a university diploma by age 14, and if I do my job correctly, I also won't be the last. I'm beautiful now, sure, but if I survive this campaign then one day I'll be all old like Misato. No one keeps their looks forever. What really sets me apart from the rest of humanity and defines my entire identity has a human is my relationship to Unit-02. It's incredible that I have to share the honor of being an Eva pilot with a dog like Shinji or a household appliance like Rei. I truly am a singular human being, a Newtype in the truest sense.

Misato was waiting for us on the surface when we arrived at HQ.

"Are you all ready?" she asked, as though nothing happened.

"Sure," Shinji said.

Rei also nodded her assent.

"Just as long as we don't have to be immersed in fucking LCL," I mumbled, loud enough for Misato to hear.

"You're in luck. It's just the plugsuits today. Please follow me."

So we went down into the GeoFront, and Rei and I went to the girls' locker room to change. Of course I know she isn't _really_ a robot, but honestly, she may as well be. She speaks when she's spoken to, she doesn't appear to have any kind of personal preference or opinion on anything, and she just mindlessly follows the orders she's given by Misato and company. There are certain… rumors, about her swirling amongst the staff at NERV, but I can't get anyone to confirm or deny anything directly. She's supposedly related to Ikari Gendo, but the exact nature of their relationship has always been left undefined. There is definitely something alien about Ayanami Rei. I decided to prod her to see if I could uncover any signs of humanity as we changed.

"What do you think about the test today?" I asked while struggling to get my left leg into my red plugsuit.

She turned and looked at me.

"I don't foresee any difficulties," she answered.

"Well duh. But what do you _think_ about it?"

Rei looked befuddled. "I think that by doing frequent synchronization tests, NERV technicians are able to continuously evaluate our performance and improve overall combat readiness."

I sighed. Even the Magi were more human than Rei was.

I finally got situated inside my plugsuit, with all the straps strapped and all the buckles buckled. Naturally, Rei finished before I did, since I guess robots have vastly better dexterity at programmed tasks than a human being. We went down to the testing chamber, and Shinji and Misato soon joined us. Without waiting for further instruction, I climbed into my test plug, pulled on my helmet, and waited for the test to start.

"Okay," Misato's voice soon came over the comm. "We're go in t minus ten seconds."

"Let's just get this over with," I grumbled.

A countdown clock appeared on my HUD, and when the timer hit zero I was submerged into the strange mind of Unit-02. I was relieved to discover that today she was feeling somewhat quiescent, as though she'd been doped up with painkillers or something. I touched her mind and she welcomed me disinterestedly. With growing prickles on my neck, I realized she was feeling introspective.

I did _not_ want to go there.

Ritsuko came over the comm and gave our statuses. "Shinji 12.1%, Asuka 8.2%, Rei 8.1%."

Damn! How could that dog be beating me?

"You're all doing fine, just keep concentrating," Misato instructed.

I definitely didn't like where Unit-02 was going. She was thinking about – her life? I know the Evangelions have a certain amount of animal material and the LCL is definitely biological, but was there a real animal brain in there somewhere to go along with its extensive AI software? It made me uncomfortable to imagine there was some kind of mind enslaved to the body of a weapons platform, even if it was just a fox or something. Unit-02 missed the simple things from her life; her mind wandered across the almost-forgotten scents, and the taste of freshly plucked berries, and the feeling of her youngling held in her arms for only a moment before the darkness overtook her… I shivered. Maybe NERV was hiding something sinister from me.

"Shinji 27.7%, Asuka 22.8%, Rei 21.0%," Ritsuko announced.

Stupid Shinji, how could he still be ahead of me? I felt Unit-02's mental gaze sweep across me and I suddenly felt strangely naked before her. I could feel judgment and disappointment, and I quailed before her.

"Asuka's down 5%! She's at 17.6%!"

"Asuka!" Misato interrupted. "What's going on? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," I hissed back through my subvocalizer.

What was Unit-02's problem? If you ask me, I'm doing everything right. I have a college degree, an impressive inheritance, and the most important job in the entire world. What more could she possibly want from me? I could feel her urging me to look inward, and I shook my head inside the test plug. I'm fine. I don't need any synthetic, artificial introspection. I _know_ who I am.

"Shinji 38.1%!"

"Good job, Shinji!" Misato congratulated.

But he was too involved with Unit-01 to even hear her. I cursed inwardly. 38.1% was an unprecedented score as far as this project went, and it exceeded even my own record. It made me furious to think that he could get ahead of me.

"Asuka 24.5%, Rei 22.1%," Ritsuko added.

All at once, I had it. I reached up and pulled the A-10 Nerve Clips out of my hair, immediately dissolving the connection between my brain and Unit-02. The HUD went dead and suddenly I was just sitting inside an inert metal torpedo. With my Nerve Clips gone, I couldn't even hear the inevitable yelling Misato must be directing my way. I forced open the door of the test plug and climbed down, while Misato ran down the stairs from the control room to confront me.

"Asuka! Just what the Hell do you think you're doing?"

I was furious. "What does it matter? If Shinji can score 38%, you don't need _me_ at all."

"Asuka, grow up!" I could tell Misato was barely holding back from slapping me. "Of course we still need you. We need all the help we can get against the Angels, and we've invested too much into you to allow you to do whatever you want! If Shinji beat you on today's test, that's just an opportunity to give you something to strive to surpass."

"I don't want to talk about it, Misato," I answered with a suppressed sigh. "I'm going home."

"Damn it, Asuka…"

But I was already walking away.

I went to the locker room, stripped off my plugsuit, and put my street clothes back on. How could Shinji the dog win? How could he be better than me? It's ridiculous to even imagine such a thing. It was probably Unit-02's fault; instead of supporting me, she only wanted to criticize. If she refused to coöperate with me, how could I possibly accomplish anything? How dare she betray me in front of everyone! I vowed right then and there I would never forgive her.

I made it to the train platform and was waiting for the next train back into Misato's neighborhood when the second line on my phone rang. I have two lines, with different ringtones, because I need to be able to distinguish between a pointless call from classmates and a NERV emergency call immediately. This ring was the emergency alert, and I picked it up with a curse.

"Fuck you, Misato! It's not funny to call me on this line just to bitch me out."

But Misato sounded serious. "Asuka, a large-scale anomaly has suddenly appeared over Tokyo-3. The lab boys are on it now, but it might be an Angel! Please return immediately, okay?"

I vacillated. Could she be lying just to bring me back to HQ?

"Fine," I muttered. "I'll be on my way."

I killed the call and then brought up the TV Tokyo-3 news app. Almost immediately my phone was streaming the station's 24 hour news channel in full resolution over the G-MAX network serving Tokyo. Sure enough, Misato was telling the truth. The news was broadcasting an image of a weird white and black striped sphere hanging over the city, and a ghastly shadow beneath it that was obviously not being cast by sunlight. I broke into a jog and shoved people out of my way as I bounded down the stairs of the subway platform. At the bottom, I spied a couple getting into a taxicab.

"Hey, government business!" I shouted.

The couple and the driver eyed me dubiously.

"I don't have time for this shit!" I hissed, whipping out my NERV identification badge.

Their eyes got wide, and they wordlessly stepped aside so that I could jump into the cab. I guess there's _something_ to be said for officialdom when it counts. At my urging, the taxi drove me the four blocks to HQ, running red lights under my direction. It might have been rude to taxijack that couple just to go a few blocks, but at the same time, with a potential Angel hanging over the city every second might count. Getting out of my way might just have saved their lives. As soon as we arrived at NERV HQ, I whipped out my government credit card and swiped it through the reader, pausing only long enough to leave the taxi driver a generous tip. Hey, it's not my money. Inside the building, I kicked everyone off a waiting elevator so I wouldn't have to stop at a dozen floors between the surface and the pilot ready room. No one protested. I suppose the loud klaxons were evidence enough that the Eva pilots need to take first priority.

I stripped and got into my plugsuit as quickly as I could. When I got to the ready room, Misato was already giving Rei and Shinji a current status report. Misato looked over at me with pursed lips.

"I'm glad you came," she said.

"Just tell me what I need to do."

"Now that you're all here, let's get you into the combat plugs. I know that getting immersed in the LCL is like torture, but in my professional opinion that thing has got to be an Angel. The boys in the lab are still arguing about it but upstairs has decided to send you three to investigate."

"O-okay, Misato!" Shinji vowed.

Rei just nodded.

As for me, I was ticked off. "They're sending us out in the Evas just to perform a little recon? Don't we have infantry for that?"

"We need to be sure, Asuka," Misato said. "And if it _is_ an Angel, we need to be able to engage it immediately. You three, please get into your combat plugs right away."

With I sigh, I filed out of the ready room behind Shinji and Rei. It just figured that NERV would drown us in LCL without even finding out first if it was truly necessary. My Interface Clips were waiting for me inside my plug, and I climbed in and shut the door without any further complaining out loud. If they were going to send us out, they were going to send us out, and short of quitting there was just nothing I could do. I got clipped up and the helmet down, and then the plug started filling with LCL.

I wanted to get it over with, so as soon as the LCL filled up to my neck I craned my head downward and tried to take a deep gasp of the terrible fluid. Instead, I ended up swallowing a mouthful. Ugh, gag! It sat heavily in my stomach as if I'd eaten too big a meal. Soon enough I didn't have much choice but to breathe the stuff, and I thrashed around inside the plug until my body stopped its involuntary struggle against breathing the perfectly safe crap. With a clang, I could feel my plug shot into the spine of Unit-02, and she thrashed with agony as the interconnection was established.

"Okay, this is the real thing," Misato said over the comm. "Remember everything you've been taught and you'll get through this just fine."

"Just get us out of here!" I demanded.

"Shinji, 29.9%, Asuka 26.2%, Rei 25.9%," Ritsuko informed us.

"Okay, everything looks good. Synchronization rates are within acceptable levels. I'm going to go ahead and release the Evas now, okay? You have them under control?"

"Yes, Misato," Shinji announced.

Rei answered, "All systems nominal."

"I'm fine! Let's just do it!"

The restraining bolts released us, and I moved Unit-02 like an artificial appendage. It was strange, and disorienting, to both see out through her eyes and yet also see the inside of the combat plug and the HUD. It took a lot of getting used to, to balance the body I was born with and the body I was only temporarily controlling. With a lurch, I got Unit-02 on her feet and moving forward, and I joined Rei and Shinji as we stalked over to the launch elevator.

"Launch ready?" Misato asked.

"Ready."

"Ready."

"Ready, steady," I said.

"Okay, here you go!"

The LCL inside the combat plug sloshed and we were launched into the air. I was only airborne for a few seconds before I crashed onto the street outside NERV HQ, smashing a parked car. I tried not to cause too much destruction to the city, I really did, but it was impossible to walk through the urban area in a giant mecha without causing millions of New Yen in property damage to civilians.

"I'm sorry!" I shouted to the absent owner of the vehicle, knowing they had no chance of hearing me.

The three of us filed through the city in our mechas. We had to step gingerly to avoid knocking down street lights or barreling through overpasses, and inevitably, we sometimes slipped and created a fresh insurance claim for the people of Tokyo-3. Idly, I wondered if Angel attacks and the mechas used to fight them were legally considered acts of God. Some sense of humor, that God. Unit-02 was in a surprisingly good mood and she seemed eager to brawl. After walking around the towering Hitachi building, the anomaly itself was in sight.

It was a weird-looking fucking thing. It was a large sphere hanging in midair over the city, and its surface was an undulating pattern of white and black stripes whose spatial relationships confused the mind. I blinked; it was strangely hypnotic, and I made a mental note not to stare at it for too long. Its shadow was strange as well. It was pitch black, blacker than the blackest night, as though somehow the darkest void of deep space had been juxtaposed with the very heart of the city. It was spooky.

Misato's voice came over the comm. "We're reading a surprisingly weak A.T. Field from that sphere, but there's no doubt about it – that's definitely an Angel. Designation: Leliel. Combat clearance granted with unlimited rules of engagement. Destroy it at any cost!"

Ritsuko came on. "Shinji 32.3%, Asuka 28.8%, Rei 28.1%."

I decided to fuck with Shinji. If he was so good, why couldn't he do this himself?

"Heyyy, Shinji-kun. I'll bet you could defeat that Angel all by yourself with a synch rate like that."

"Shut up, Asuka," he replied angrily.

Misato added warningly, "Cut it out, Asuka."

I piled it on.

"I'll bet you don't need any help from anyone, not even your father!"

With a sudden roar, he broke formation and bum-rushed the sphere, trying to get under it so he could fire directly upwards at it. I was amused that just _mentioning_ his father was enough to set him off like that; such an emotional response left him vulnerable in battle. Rei and I picked up the pace, trying to keep our Evangelions in a loose formation. Suddenly, the Angel moved in our direction, the shadow under it moving with it.

Shinji's voice came over the comm. "Hey, what the – agggh!"

I couldn't believe my eyes. Unit-01 and Shinji along with it encountered the shadow, and then they both vanished inside. With a growing sense of concern, I realized the shadow was headed right at Unit-02 and I. Unit-02 roared, and I felt her being dragged against her will towards the yawning, consuming maw moving across the surface of Tokyo-3.

Ritsuko came over the comm. "Everyone, be careful! The shadow is the real threat!"

I checked my A.T. Field detector and, sure enough, the sphere in the air was just a 3 dimensional shadow of a hyperdimensional being. The thin membrane of darkness moving across the ground was the real Angel.

"Scheiße! I yelled, trying to dig Unit-02's claws into the pavement to keep her from being sucked forward towards the void.

Rei pulled around with Unit-00, trying to flank it. I realized I was in danger of being sucked in as Liliel continued to advance. Without thinking, I smashed my glaive against a nearby skyscraper, using it to kill my momentum towards the Angel. Though Unit-02 groaned in anger and I could hear the creaking of joints and bolts, the skyscraper held my weight, and the shadow passed by without causing me further harm.

"Misato! What the Hell do we do?" I demanded.

"Upstairs says to pull back for now!" Misato ordered.

I blinked. "But Unit-01…!"

"There's nothing we can do for now. The lab boys are going to get on it, but as long as you're out there without a plan, you're vulnerable. We can't risk losing another Eva to that thing!"

Rei came on the channel, much to my surprise.

"Is Shinji… alright?"

"I don't know!" Misato shouted.

It's not like I care about Shinji or anything like that. But losing a third of our operational capacity in battle would not be a good thing. Still, Misato had a point. Until the lab boys analyzed all of the available data and came up with an action plan, we were basically helpless against that Angel. It was strange how they could all be so similar, and yet so fundamentally different. They managed to surprise us every time with their evolution in appearance and tactics. Now that I was clear of Liliel, I jerked my glaive out of the Hitachi building. Fixing _that_ wasn't going to be cheap, but it's not like I had much of a choice, did I? Rei and I reentered formation and retreated towards the NERV complex, and I watched our left flank while she kept an eye on the right.

It was galling to withdraw from a battle, but I obediently joined Rei on the elevator and it took us down into the loading bay. After a half hour of coughing and throwing up, I was finally clear of the LCL, and I definitely wasn't looking forward to being reimmersed whenever the tech team finally figured out what was going on. Naturally, stupid Misato wouldn't allow us into the control room to analyze the situation, and she even went so far as to lock us in the pilot ready room to keep us on hand and yet out from underfoot. How fucking insulting. Maybe I could help, if they bothered to give me a chance. NERV never told us anything important; they just use us when we're needed and throw us in a closet when we're not in use, like we're just tools instead of people.

At least we had a big television. Rei and I watched TV Tokyo-3 news as the situation unfolded. The Angel clearly had some control over its manifestation in our universe, because it wasn't an all-consuming black hole. Instead, it was very selective, and in fact other than Unit-01 I didn't see it eat anything at all. It wandered aimlessly around the city like an amoeba and I couldn't determine any kind of goal or direction from its behavior. Just one more fucked up mystery to add to the ledger, I guess.

The crisis dragged on and on, and eventually my anxiety evolved into boredom. I tried calling Misato a couple times, but she didn't even bother answering, that bitch. I had to strip off enough of my plugsuit to use the bathroom which was a huge inconvenience, but without the life support functionality of a plug, if I – well, you know – in the suit, I'd just end up stewing in my own juices instead of getting it vacuumed out through a tube. I tried to engage Rei in conversation a few times, but her AI seemed less intricately programmed than even Eliza. I played video games on my phone. Eventually, I went to sleep.

Misato woke us up the next morning looking haggard and pale. At least she brought a cart with breakfast from NERV's cafeteria with her.

"Misato, what's going on!?" I demanded before she could open her mouth.

"Sorry, I've been up all night." She coughed and looked vaguely confused. "Still no solution yet. They're considering – well, you don't need to know anything about that. Suffice it to say we're doing everything we can to rescue Shinji and Unit-01 without compromising the safety of the city."

"What do you mean, I don't need to know?" I demanded.

Rei grabbed a breakfast sushi off the cart and chewed on it with a thoughtful look. I was relieved to see that there was some Western-style breakfast, too; eggs, bacon, and a steaming cup of fresh coffee.

"Look, we just need you both on standby in case anything happens. Sorry, you can't enjoy being cooped up in the ready room in your plugsuits for the better part of the day. I sympathize, I really do." She sighed. "Anyway, no rest for the weary; not even the extremely weary. Back to work."

She seemed to be talking to herself almost as much as she was addressing us. I really was hungry, so I dug into the bacon and eggs with gusto.

"Do you think Shinji is going to be alright?" Rei asked.

I shrugged, and my metamaterial plugsuit crinkled at my shoulders and armpits.

"Considering these idiots, who knows?" I answered.

Rei looked … somehow sad, and directed her attention back to the television. The people of Tokyo-3 were given a shelter-in-place command, and all industry in the city had ground to a standstill. If you needed breakfast, or your day's wages, or even a trip to the hospital, that was just too damn bad. Even the police weren't out enforcing the order – they didn't need to be. Tokyo-3 had endured enough destruction over the course of this strange campaign that anyone who could flee did at the first wail of the air raid sirens and anyone who couldn't stayed in their home or workplace and just prayed for the best. Many thousands have died.

I went back to the book I was reading, The Name of the Rose. Nothing continued to happen.

After another interminable length of time, Rei suddenly tugged on my arm. I looked over at her.

"Asuka, look at the TV," she said quietly.

Sure enough, something _was_ happening. A bright light appeared in the center of the membrane, and with a sudden burst of blood and energy Unit-01 pushed itself out of the hole. I gasped, and even Rei smiled.

"He's going to be okay," Rei said.

I wasn't so sure, but far be it from me to crush her android hopes if she was capable of having any.

My phone rang, and I saw it was Misato. I took the call and put it on speakerphone for Rei's benefit.

"Shinji's fine," she said. "Liliel is defeated and you're both off dismissed from standby. We'll be home later today, so please prepare dinner, okay?"

I shrugged. "Okay, Misato."

Honestly, I was just relieved to get out of the claustrophobic ready room. Plus, after being drenched in LCL and then steeped in our own sweat for hours and hours, it was really starting to smell in there.

I made spring rolls for dinner, and of _course_ Misato was in possession of a deep fryer. I found cooking to be extremely therapeutic, and it helped me forget the traumatic events of the day. At dinner, neither Shinji nor Misato had much to say about the Liliel incident. Shinji would only assert that it had been "awful" and he was unusually quiet. Misato would tell me nothing except the party line – Liliel was dead at Unit-01's hand. I was irritated that I wasn't the one to destroy the Angel, but looking at the expression on Shinji's face, I could only wonder if it wasn't for the best.

**End Chapter-04**


	6. 05 - LCL and Cinnamon

Breakfast, Misato's apartment. After I finished my Western-style breakfast of French toast glazed with cinnamon and sugar, Shinji dared me to go just a little bit further. Misato watched us argue with disinterest.

"Well, are you going to do it?"

"I still don't see what the big deal is."

"Are you going to chicken out or not?"

I stared at the tablespoon packed high with cinnamon. "It's just fucking cinnamon. The whole challenge is just eating a tablespoon of it?"

Shinji nodded.

"Don't do it, Asuka," Misato warned.

Well, that tears it, doesn't it? If Misato says it's a bad idea then it's almost certainly even easier than it sounds. Without another word I jammed the spoonful of cinnamon in my mouth and tried to swallow. A sudden wave of agony blossomed in my skull as the cinnamon seemed to suck all the moisture out of my mouth at once. Before I could react, I started involuntarily coughing, sending a cloud of aerosolized cinnamon all over the kitchen. It also went up my nose, into my throat, and I even inhaled some into my lungs. The pungent spice burned like Hell everywhere it touched mucus. I wanted to curse Shinji to the nethermost pit of Hell, but I was too busy coughing my lungs out.

"I told you not to do it," Misato said with a sigh.

I glared at her with tears streaming down my cheeks. Shinji, that idiot, was laughing his ass off.

It was almost as bad as coming out of the LCL. I could taste cinnamon inside my nostrils even after I could finally breathe again without gasping. My eyes were foggy with tears. Shinji was still laughing, so I socked him in the kidney before going to the bathroom to try to wash the awful taste of cinnamon out of my mouth. I don't think I'll ever look at French toast the same way again.

Before I could fully recover, Misato was already pounding on the bathroom door.

"Hey Asuka, hurry up! We're going to be late if you aren't out and dressed in the next five minutes."

Damn it! I hadn't even had time to start combing my hair. I did a perfunctory once over before retreating into my room. The monthly stipend from my father is more than enough to maintain a good wardrobe, and my closet was almost full to bursting with everything from casual tank tops to sleek dresses, as the situation warrants. Trust the Japanese to make us all wear uniforms to school, the cryptofascists. With a sigh, I shucked the oversized tee shirt I used as nightwear and climbed into my skirt. At least I looked good in the cerulean color. I felt another wave of unpleasant burning crawl around in my throat, and spent another couple of minutes coughing before I could finish dressing.

Damn that Shinji!

Misato pounded on the door once more and then strode into my room with an irritated look on her face. I glared at her with my hands on my hips.

"Hey, don't just come in here without permission!" I loudly objected. "What if I'd been naked or something?"

Misato rolled her eyes. "Everyone's already seen you naked, Asuka, so there are no more mysteries there. Hurry up and let's get going!"

I hissed at her in fury. I'd almost managed to forget the synch test we did without plugsuits. I'm sure Shinji whacks off to the memory every night, and it gives me the willies to think he touches himself with those kinds of fantasies running through his head. Fortunately, I was already fully dressed, though I'd have to work on my hair while we were in the car. I grabbed a comb and my purse and sullenly followed Shinji and Misato into the elevator down to the garage. I vowed to get revenge on the pair of them, sooner rather than later.

So Misato drove us to school. I'm sure you know the routine by now. My teachers drone, I occasionally write down and practice useful Kanji, and I spend intervening intervals goofing off on my phone and glaring at anyone who looks like they want to ask me a question. After school, I changed into street clothes and went shopping downtown. I turned more than a few heads but I guess that's to be expected when you wear a copper-colored dress of clingy metamaterial complimented with brown boots. I hate high heels with a fiery passion, and it's always hard to find low heeled boots that aren't also – ugh – Uggs. I thought the shimmering metallic fabric of the dress set off my red hair nicely, and judging from the double takes occasionally done by passersby, everyone else seems to agree. Before I could get an early dinner out, I got a phone call from NERV. We had to do yet more synch tests. It just never _ends_.

"Shinji 18.5%. Asuka 27.7%. Rei 24.5%," Ritsuko intoned over the comm.

"Ha! Just as expected, your victory the other day was nothing but a fluke," I said to Shinji.

Misato muttered, "Why don't you just shut up, Asuka?"

Like _she_ was going to bring me down. I was ahead of Shinji once again, restoring my rightful role as the greatest of all Eva pilots.

Unit-02 was surprisingly docile. Her attitude generally swung between bitter fury and brooding over her previous life, whatever it had been; today, she was cooperative if a little passive. I urged her on and she responded, bringing my synch rate far above Shinji's. He had been in a funk ever since defeating Liliel, which came as quite a surprise to me. I would have been ecstatic to have seen another dimension with my own eyes, not to mention defeat one of the Angels basically singlehandedly. Instead, Shinji sulked about it like a little boy.

Unit-02's good attitude helped me maintain a handy lead over Shinji and Rei, and when the test finally ended, I felt really good about myself. Misato summoned us all to the control room to go over the synch test results, and I glowed with pride when I saw that Kaji was also there, discussing something unrelated with the two NERV drones.

"Hey, Kaji," I suggested, trying to get his attention.

Nothing. He was busy bullshitting with Misato.

I tried again. "Kaji, I totally creamed today."

"That's nice, Asuka," he said distantly before continuing his conversation with Misato.

Well, fuck that. I decided to pick up his tablet and see if _that_ got his attention. Much to my dismay, he didn't even glance over at me, so I powered on the screen and was surprised to find a hypertext document about us Eva pilots. Scrolling through a couple links, it was nothing I couldn't have already surmised; spreadsheets of synch rate data, some basic biographical information, and a detailed list of – wait, what? "The Fourth Child?" Is there another pilot they aren't telling us about? I greedily opened the link, and was struck temporarily dumb by the data on the tablet's screen.

Toji was being groomed to be a new Eva pilot. I couldn't believe it.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" I groaned out loud. "That idiot Toji is as immature as he is unqualified. You can't possibly be serious about this."

Kaji finally looked over with a scowl. "That's what you get for meddling with other peoples' things. Why don't you put it down before you learn anything else you don't want to know?"

"Kaji, Misato, seriously! There is _no way_ I'm going to share the field with _Toji_ of all people. Did you just go through the records of our high school to pick out the least scholarly, least trained, least brave, and least … least… least _competent_ of anyone at our school and then choose them!?"

Misato snapped.

"It has nothing to do with those qualities, Asuka!" she hissed. "If it was about anything other than aptitude for resonance with the Evangelions, we would be using professional soldiers instead of a bunch of _children_. Toji is the Fourth Child not because we wanted to use him any more than we wanted to use you or Shinji – he's the Fourth Child because he's shown the best synchronization potential of anyone else we've tested so far!"

My good mood evaporated. Without another word, I turned on my heel and strode out of the control room.  
I was fuming as I changed out of my plugsuit and back into my dress. As if sharing the stage with Shinji and Rei wasn't bad enough, they were going to add another total idiot to the mix. It would be a miracle if he didn't end up getting us all killed, and furthermore, did that mean there was another Eva Unit floating around NERV never told us about? God, dealing with these fools is so frustrating. They never tell us anything until the worst case scenario has already unfolded and it's too late to nip the disaster in the bud before it gets out of control.

I spent the rest of the evening wasting time. I went to an arcade in Tokyo-3's New Shinjuku district, and handily took down all challengers in the newest Dead or Alive and Dance Dance Revolution. Not much of a surprise, really; the kind of skills that made it possible for me to synch with Unit-02 also fuelled my competence at simpler things like video games. I trounced all the high school and college students who thought they could easily take down a gaijin on their home turf, and I refused a half-dozen phone numbers when I finally got bored and decided to head back downtown. A few of them recognized me as Unit-02's pilot. I submitted to signing a few autographs with a Sütterlin flourish; after all, a famous hero should have the magnanimity to occasionally throw a bone to the commoners.

I got dinner at a ramen house and soon regretted it. I shouldn't have gone to a sitdown restaurant on my own. Everyone, including the waitress, kept throwing me apologetic glances, so I guess they must have assumed I was eating alone because I'd been stood up by my boyfriend. I was so uncomfortable eating on my own that the ramen tasted like ashes in my mouth, even though I knew that objectively speaking it was cooked and spiced to perfection. I ate quickly and already had my corporate credit card out when the waitress brought the bill, and I was relieved to get out of there as soon as I could. Still, it was better than facing the drunken slut Misato or the perpetually petulant Shinji at dinner. I didn't much like jewelry, but I went window shopping at chic jewelry shops in the Ginza district anyway, hoping not to return to Misato's apartment until everyone was in bed.

"Misato, what's going on?" I demanded at synch tests the next day.

Misato looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Because we're dealing with a new pilot today, we want you all to do a full LCL immersion before hooking up to your Evas."

"And why are we at Matsushiro?" Shinji added.

Misato sighed. "Naturally, we wouldn't be doing this test at all if we thought there would be any danger. Nevertheless, NERV brass thinks it's better to do an initial activation at the secondary facility just in case anything goes wrong. This is all about expecting the best but preparing for the worst, alright? We've had problems with initial activations before."

Shinji looked pensive, but I was still feeling defiant.

"Why do we have to go to all this trouble for the Fourth Child anyway?" I asked. "Isn't three more than enough?"

"It's always good to develop as many options as possible, Asuka," Misato answered quietly.

I gave in. "Oh, fine! But there had better be good shower facilities in Matsushiro's ready room!"

So we stripped down and got into our plugsuits in the portable trailer. Apparently, the Fourth Child was already in his plug and was just waiting to go ahead with primary activation. I pointedly turned away from Shinji while I changed, and while even my ass was more than he had any right to see, my hair would cover half of it. Anyway, it was still better than letting him face me in all my glory.

I will never forgive NERV for these ceaseless indignities. Never!

I took a long look at Unit-03 before getting into my plug. Like all Evangelions, including even my own Unit-02, it was ugly as sin. It looked like the kind of gargoyles you seen on gothic cathedrals in Germany, all hissing mouth and hateful eyes. It carried a pair of tonfa, one in each hand. Something about it made me shudder with discomfort. Unit-03 had a vaguely sinister aura.

Guess what? Getting drowned in LCL still sucks. You know, you'd think that occasionally you'd have some kind of experience that was _uniquely_ shitty, but no, it's the same obnoxious and unpleasant shit over and over and over again. I'll leave out most of the grim details, but during the process the suit's life support pumps proved sadly necessary thanks to the way the human body responds in situations of life-threatening terror, which getting drowned in fluid no matter how oxygenated "strangely" manages to replicate. Those unpleasantries aside, after half an hour all four of us were calmed down enough to begin the initial synchronization routine. They keyed in the three experienced pilots first, which struck me as a surprisingly intelligent tactical decision.

Unit-02's mind was very stable, like a big lake that only has very shallow tidal waves lapping at its shore. I wondered what she was thinking about. Maybe she was getting lessons from the same Zen master my father had made me train under the moment he succeeded at getting his daughter into the Evangelion program.

"Shinji 17.1%, Asuka 28.8%, Rei 25.6%," Ritsuko announced over the comm.

"What's wrong, Shinji?" I gloated over the open channel. "You're never going to impress your father with synch rates like that!"

Misato cut in sharply, "That's enough, Asuka! I'll cut your mike if you don't behave."

I muttered something inarticulate under my breath, enough that Misato knew I'd said something but not enough for her to hear the curse. She just ignored it though.

"Okay, pilots, are you ready? We're going to start the procedure with the Fourth Child now."

I checked the safety on my guns. "Ready, Misato."

"Ready," Shinji said, not sounding very ready.

Of course, Rei's robotic nature kicked in when it was her turn to reply. "All systems nominal."

"Opening synch channel between Fourth Child and Unit-03 now," Ritsuko announced.

I kept careful watch on Unit-03, scanning it with my HUD. At first, everything seemed to go okay, and Unit-03's A.T. Field flared to life. My finger moved imperceptibly away from the trigger.

"Something's wrong!" Ritsuko cried.

"Pilots, Unit-03 is infected by the Thirteenth Angel! Target designation Bardiel!" Misato cried.

I gasped in horror. "But the pilot of Unit-03 is…"

I looked up and was astonished to find that Unit-03 was no longer there. After a quick glance at my radar, I saw the other Eva was flanking me, coming at me from the left side faster than I could believe. I spun on my heel to face the crazed Evangelion, but it was face to face with me even as I tried to bring up my weapon to defend myself. It had an insane look in its eyes, and I could see pus erupting from where Unit-03's plug was fixed into its spinal column. Misato was right – there could be no doubt that this feeling was the feeling of confronting an Angel. I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my belly, communicated across the interlink as Unit-02 roared in agony. Too shocked to react, I doubled over, unable to force Unit-02 to follow my commands.

"Asuka!" Misato cried over the comm.

I hurt too much to answer her. I hurt too much to breathe.

When I was finally able to look back up, I saw that Unit-03 had Rei's Unit-00 pressed down into the ground, with her ineffectually pointing her rifle at the demonic Evangelion and yet refusing to fire. I wondered what in her robot mind made her hesitate. I tried to get Unit-02 back on her feet, but she stumbled into the dirt, still clutching the gaping wound Unit-03 did to her belly. I swore and cried tears of pain into the LCL fluid sloshing around my head. It was enough for me to fight through the pain, but the body of Unit-02 wasn't responding to my commands, high synchronization rate or no. I was helpless.

"I can't - " Rei whispered over the open channel.

"I won't fight it!" Shinji cried.

"What are you talking about Shinji?" Misato demanded.

"I won't fight Unit-03 with the pilot still inside!"

I could hear Shinji sobbing over the comm. Damn it, with me out of action and Shinji simply refusing to fight, Unit-03 could tear us apart at its leisure. I wanted to curse him, but Gendo's voice stopped me cold.

"Misato, please sever Shinji's link and activate the dummy plug system."

The dummy plug? Far be it from me to criticize the judgment of a man as great as Ikari Gendo, but to the best of my knowledge the artificial control unit for the Evas hadn't worked once. He was ordering Misato to hand control of the most dangerous weapons platform ever built by human beings to an artificial control system that could be deemed unreliable at best. Was he serious? Misato must have shared my concerns.

"But sir," she protested.

Commander Ikari spoke in a tone that brooked no refusal. "Do it, Major Misato."

I continued struggling with Unit-02's will while Unit-01 shrieked its rage above as the dummy plug kicked in. Damn it, Unit-02's earlier placid behavior was now working against me, and I just couldn't convince her to care about the danger posed by the Thirteenth Angel and now the out of control Unit-01. Frankly, it seemed like Unit-02 just didn't care if she died. I tried to explain to her, in mental imagery rather than words, why life was worth living to her, but who was I fooling? What _did_ Unit-02 have to live for? Everything she'd been in her previous life had been taken away from her, and the best she could hope for was to live long enough to – what? What future is there for Evangelions even if we do win the war against the Angels? Knowing Ikari Gendo's pragmatism, he'd either invent a new enemy for them to fight or send them upstate to Uncle Ted's glue farm; they were too dangerous to be permitted to find meaning in their own existences. I wasn't sure if I was feeling Unit-02's despair or she my own.

Unit-02 craned her head up enough so that we could watch the situation unfold. With the dummy plug in place, Unit-01 had gone entirely apeshit, and was busy pounding Unit-03's face into an unrecognizable paste. I noted with dismay that much of the biomass of Unit-03 had been corrupted into the hideous, leaking mucus of the body of Bardiel. I wanted to avert my eyes but I didn't dare.

"Stop it!" Shinji shrieked over the comm link. "Father, make it stop!"

Unit-01 was now tearing at the Toji's entry plug in its blind fury. I tried to close my eyes, but something inside wouldn't allow me. The least I could do to honor the hapless Fourth Child was witness his death without looking away. With another bellow of rage, Unit-01 pounded the combat plug with its fists, cracking it open like and egg and spilling LCL all over the soil at Matsushiro.

"Bardiel's A.T. Field is dissipating," Misato whispered over the channel. "The Thirteenth Angel is destroyed."

"Deactivate the dummy plug."

Even I was appalled by the callous disinterest in Gendo's voice.

Shinji was openly sobbing about the Fourth Child, still ignorant of the fact that it was his dear friend Toji. Suddenly, the interlink between Unit-02 and me was severed, and I was nothing but a young woman breathing oxygenated ick inside a torpedo tube.

"He's alive," Ritsuko said. "Badly injured, but so far, alive."

My plug was ejected and fell to the soil with a loud clang. I forced open the hatch and fell to the ground, coughing, sneezing, and vomiting the LCL out of my system. In the background, as I struggled to regain my composure, I heard the wail when Shinji discovered that the unlucky pilot of Unit-03 was his friend Suzuhara Toji.


	7. 06 - The Strength to Disobey

**Chapter-06: The Strength to Disobey**

Another day, another round of synch tests. This time, however, something was clearly wrong. I hadn't seen Shinji in days, even at the apartment; he'd been MIA ever since the incident with Toji and Unit-03. The last time I saw him he was just silently watching the remains of Unit-03 burned, finally eliminating the threat of further infection. Rei and I stood in front of Misato in our plugsuits, and there was still no Shinji to be seen. I finally decided to ask the obvious question.

"Hey, Misato. What happened to Shinji?"

Her face noticeably darkened.

"He's still trying to decide if he's capable of being an Evangelion pilot," she explained after a long silence.

I blinked. "What? Is this all about Toji? The Fourth Child tried to fight and failed. It's bad luck that Bardiel infected Unit-03, but at least Toji survived."

"It's just not that simple, Asuka," Misato replied, shaking her head. "Maybe it was a mistake to rely on young people from the beginning, but adults are psychologically unable to synchronize with the Evas so what could we do?"

"Do you think Shinji will return?"

I was surprised to hear Rei generate an independent thought.

"I don't know," Misato admitted.

With that, she pulled out her tablet and waved her finger in our faces.

"Anyway, one way or another, NERV still needs the two of you to keep doing your jobs. Stop worrying about Shinji; he has to work things out on his own. It's going to be difficult enough to look after yourselves from now on so just focus on that, okay?"

"Yes," Rei reflexively answered.

I just shrugged, which Misato took as good enough.

"Today's synchronization tests are the usual. No LCL – aren't you lucky!?"

Misato's feigned enthusiasm failed to be infectious, but I was still glad that today's exercises wouldn't require LCL immersion. I peaked at 32.7%, stayed well ahead of Rei for most of the exercise, and didn't have any problems with Unit-02 throughout. It was strange performing the tests without Shinji there. It's not like I have any affection for him or anything, but he was like a piece of comfortable furniture that I was accustomed to seeing and it was strange to have him gone. After we were finished, I took the train home, alone, and I was surprised to discover Shinji in the living room staring vacantly into the television.

"Just what the Hell do you think you're doing, Ikari Shinji?" I accused with my hands on my hips.

He looked up at me with dull eyes.

"I never asked to be an Eva pilot, Asuka. They can't make me do it."

I snorted. "Are you a fool or something? Is this all about Toji?"

"No. It's about me. I'm a coward, Asuka, and I have no right to pilot Unit-01. I think you've been right all along. I'm just a scared little boy, and it's stupid of me to even try. Save the world? What a joke. I can't even protect my friends when they need me."

I was taken aback by his nihilism.

"H-hey! What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I quit. Today I told my father to his face that I would never pilot an Evangelion again. He threatened me with all kinds of shit but I refused to back down. So as of this moment, I'm no longer a member of NERV. I'm just Ikari Shinji, a scared little boy."

"You must be joking!" I was legitimately pissed. "How dare you quit on your father after all the faith he's had in you?"

"He has no faith in me at all! He just sees me as a tool he can use, the same way that he treats everyone!" Shinji countered.

I took a deep breath and let it out. The truth was I didn't know what to say to him. Could it be true that Shinji had already quit? I didn't know Ikari Gendo well, but I did know him to be a proud man, proud almost to the point of arrogance. Would Gendo take Shinji back as a pilot even if he begged?

"How many Angels are there, anyway?" Shinji went on. "Was Bardiel the last one? Are there another hundred to go? What if there's no limit to the number of Angels that come, and one after another after another will descend until the human race has finally been driven into extinction? If death is inevitable, I'd rather die on my own terms, instead of being driven into the ground by my father's ambition just like Toji!"

"How can you compare yourself to him? Toji didn't run!" I screamed at him.

"Well I am! What difference does it make?"

Before I had a chance to answer, the apartment lock clicked open and Misato walked into the living room with an unhappy look on her face. It was only eighteen hundred hours, and I was surprised to see her out of the office at such an early hour; maybe Ikari Gendo sent her to try to talk some sense into Shinji?

"Do you stand by your decision?" Misato asked quietly.

Shinji was defiant. "Yes. I will never pilot Unit-01 again."

"Fine." Misato's voice was cold. "NERV doesn't employ slaves, and we don't have need of a petulant child that turns tail and runs every time something goes wrong. If you were a soldier – if you were an adult – maybe you'd understand the importance of duty. I think it's a pity that you've decided that duty, honor, and conviction aren't worth the effort to learn, even even it hurts."

"I made my decision, Misato," Shinji replied levelly.

"Very well."

Misato handed him a manila envelope. He opened it curiously, and I could see that among other things there was a train ticket and a house key tagged with an address in the north, a hundred kilometers from Tokyo-3. There was also some cash and a bank card I couldn't read.

"Your father wants you out of the city," Misato explained. "He doesn't ever want to see your face again."

"I don't care."

Shinji went to his room and ten minutes later came out with a loaded suitcase. He didn't own a ton of things, but it was obvious he was only taking a small amount of his personal belongings. I guess he didn't want anything to remind him of his time as an Eva pilot. Misato and I watched wordlessly as he dropped Misato's apartment key on the coffee table, and then walked out of the door and out of our lives forever.

"Idiot," Misato hissed.

It sounded like she was choking back tears.

"Is he really gone for good?" I asked.

"I think so. Commander Ikari is through with him."

"Misato…" I wasn't sure what to say. "Misato, I'm sorry."

"Why are _you_ sorry? It's got nothing to do with you, Asuka."

"I just feel like; maybe if I'd done something different, Shinji wouldn't be leaving. I feel like there's something more I could have done. Maybe if I'd been able to force Unit-02 to stand up Toji might-"

Much to my amazement, Misato silenced me with a hug. A moment later, she released me, and she stepped back and looked into my eyes.

"Asuka, this is something important you have to learn about growing up. Sometimes, there's nothing you can do. Sometimes you just have to stand aside and watch people make decisions that you know aren't good for them. You can give people good advice, and you can argue with them and plead with them and threaten them all day, but you can't make their choices for them. Sometimes all you can do is watch while they throw away everything that's important."

I was quiet for a minute. I started to wonder, in some strange way, if she was also talking about me.

Or even about herself.

Before the tableau could be resolved, Misato's phone and my phone rang simultaneously. I knew from the ringtone that it was an emergency call from NERV HQ. With a sinking sensation, I accepted the incoming call.

"Soryu Asuka!" some underling of Ritsuko announced with a panicked voice. "NERV is under attack! Please, get down here at once!"

"I'm on my way," I said, grabbing my coat and hanging up the phone.

Misato looked frightened. "Asuka, come with me, I'll drive!"

NERV had thoughtfully given Misato a siren for the top of her car, though the air raid sirens echoing throughout Tokyo-3 gave people more than enough incentive to get off the streets. The few cars remaining on the road, mostly people trying to get back home instead of going to the nearest bomb shelter per muncipial law, got out of the way so Misato could roar past. I held tightly to the car's ceiling handhold; Misato's driving can be unsettling at the best of times, and now that she was in a hurry it was downright terrifying.

"Ergh!" I shrieked. "Watch out for that lamppost!"

I could swear we got within millimeters as Misato handbraked around a corner.

"Don't disrupt my concentration," Misato muttered under her breath.

After we barely cleared another intersection without violent death, I turned to her, watching her distraught face.

"Misato, why is another Angel attacking so soon?" I asked. "It's only been a few days this time!"

"I don't know, Asuka. I really don't know. But that's something for the math boys to work out – our job's the same either way."

I sighed and looked out of the window. Misato narrowly avoided running down a gaggle of salarymen scrambling across the street for the nearest shelter.

"Oh!" I cried as a barrage of missiles flew up from Tokyo-3. "Why are they bothering? That never works!"

"Maybe it will at least slow down the Angel for a few minutes."

Misato reached up and hit the button for the control to NERV's underground garage, and she drifted inside at breathtaking speeds, tires squealing. I closed my eyes, certain I was going to die in a car wreck courtesy of Misato long before an Angel could do me in. Every klaxon in the place was wailing out of control, and NERV personnel were in a panic unlike I'd ever seen from them. NERV doesn't have valet parking but Misato left her car in the middle of the garage anyway, not bothering to color within the lines while such a dire emergency was taking place. She hurried me onto the elevator that led to the lower floors, when suddenly the building shook with a terrifying blast. I'm not proud of it, but I think I screamed. All the power in the elevator died for two seconds before coming back on, and I was briefly nauseous as I imagined having to climb down the ladder to the lower floor rung by rung as NERV HQ rocked under repeated barrages from the Angel.

"Misato!" My teeth were chattering with fear. "What's going on?"

"I don't know! I think NERV…!"

The elevator let us off on our floor just before the building shook with another huge explosion. Ritsuko must have seen us coming on the security monitors, because she was waiting for us when we got off the elevator.

"Ritsuko! What's happening?!" Misato didn't try to disguise the terror in her voice.

"NERV HQ is under direct assault! Two of the Geofront's armored shells have already been breached!"

"Damn! Asuka, get in your combat plug at once!"

I was already on my way to the locker room. The building shook a few more times under heavy assault while I struggled to get my red plugsuit on. Fiddling with the tricky metamaterial was difficult enough when my heart wasn't throbbing in my chest at a million beats a minute, and the occasional shaking of the building didn't help my dexterity much, either. Finally I was ready, and I climbed up the ladder, walked across the catwalk, and dropped myself down into my combat plug totally by muscle memory. I was already so amped from the adrenalin that I hardly noticed the thrashing and quaking of my body as the LCL rose in the plug to drowning levels, and then I was under. I picked up my helmet and the HUD flared to life.

"Asuka! You're only at 12.1% but you have to go anyway! Get to the service elevator at the left end of the bay!"

I was confused. That elevator didn't go to the surface; instead, it would carry an Evangelion either down to the secret research facilities that were off-limits even to us Eva pilots, or up to the NERV HQ building itself, in a big open area that serves as the heart of the GeoFront.

"What do you mean?" I demanded. "That lift doesn't go to the surface!"

Misato's voice was strained. "It's too late. Angel Zeruel has breached nine of the armor layers and is already inside the facility!"

"But-!"

"Don't argue with me, Asuka! We're taking you up to the GeoFront itself. There's no way we can prevent Zeruel from breaching the rest of the armor, but we've set up a huge supply of weapons and ammunition in the GeoFront so you can fight it there!"

"That's cutting it a little close for comfort," I groaned, but I obediently forced Unit-02 over to the elevator over her struggling.

Picking up on my own terror, Unit-02 was almost uncontrollable. Despite my efficiency in synchronizing during the tests, things in combat were just so much harder to manage. My heart thundered in my chest as I forced an unwilling Unit-02 onto the alternate service elevator. I tried to send her tendrils of comforting psychic energy, but she was having none of it. She was terrified and furious at her own terror. It was all I could do to keep her from jumping off the elevator and into the void.

The entire building shook again while I tried to scramble off the elevator, and Unit-02 almost fell flat on her face. Once I recovered, I was shocked to see that Misato hadn't been kidding. It looked like NERV personnel had moved the entire armory up to GeoFront level in order to stave off the Angel. With Shinji gone forever and Rei nowhere in sight, I scanned the various weapons available for what would give me the highest defensive potential. I didn't want to get anywhere near this Angel, so the prog knife or vibroblade spear were out of the question. The bolt pistols weren't powerful enough for my tastes. Then I spied a half-dozen handheld Phalanx cannons, specifically designed for use by Evas. That, I thought, would do nicely.

Normally, nothing about the engaging with the Phalanx was a good idea. It fired a truly prodigious number of shells per second and instead of sounding like a barking gun it was more like a deafening buzz due to the number of rounds ejected per second. It was normally off-limits for us to use; there was too much collateral damage associated with shooting the thing anywhere near a city. It fired 100 22mm rounds a second and chewed anything it was aimed at to scrap. NERV must be running scared to provide me with such overwhelming firepower. I tested my strength, picked up a pair of them, and smiled to myself. Dual-wielding Phalanx autocannons ought to make it a snap to turn this Zeruel into mush.

The entire building rocked again, and I struggled to maintain my balance. With each successive breach Zeruel shook the entire facility like a seismic event. Dust and rocks rained down from the ceiling; it must be getting close now. I raised my pair of Phalanx cannons and aimed them at the region where the HUD predicted the Angel would break through to the heart of the GeoFront. Zeruel was disregarding all sense of tactics or strategy, and was apparently just tearing its way through one armored barrier after the next on its way directly to the heart of the facility. I took a deep breath and steadied my aim.

"Asuka, look out! It's coming through!" Misato warned.

I didn't bother answering. With shocking suddenness considering how long it took Zeruel to get all the way down to the heart of NERV, the Angel burst through the ceiling with a shower of dust and a shriek of strained metal. I opened up immediately, screaming, and Unit-02 roared with me. Having an actual target to engage seemed to calm her down; it gave her a place to focus her anger instead of being a wrecking ball of undirected rage. The pair of Phalanxes buzzed like the biggest nest of angry bees to ever exist, and my arms vibrated in agony as the weapons spat bullet after bullet after bullet from their barrels at the alien monster.

"How am I doing?" I yelled over the comm.

Misato advised, "Keep firing, it still has a functioning A.T. Field!"

My ammunition didn't last long firing 6000 rounds per minute, so I discarded the empty pair of Phalanxes and picked up another two. I couldn't see anything, thanks to all the dust and debris raining down, but I wasn't going to take any chances with something as dangerous as an Angel. I picked up the next two cannons and fired into the cloud where my HUD insisted the Angel was still living. After I emptied the next two, I couldn't believe my eyes; my HUD said that the Angel's A.T. Field was still active.

"Misato, am I reading this right?" I asked incredulously.

"We show the same in the control room. Asuka, that Angel is still alive!"

"Scheiße, how can that be possible!?"

I decided to abandon the ineffective Phalanxes, and I cast them aside for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher massively upsized to take into account the strength of an Evangelion. Each rocket contained the equivalent explosive output as 20 tons of TNT – incredibly dangerous to use within the enclosed structure of the GeoFront, but if Zeruel was just shrugging off Phalanx rounds I didn't see how I had much of a choice.

"Get everyone in fortified rooms!" I screamed to Misato. "I'm using the RPG-H2."

For a second she made a noise like she was going to argue, but it was obvious I had few alternatives.

"Okay! Give us thirty seconds," she said.

I carefully counted to thirty and then let loose with the gigantic rocket launcher. Some of the dust had settled, but I could only see a few bright flashes from behind the swirling cloud of debris indicating the presence of the Angel. I had no idea what it was planning and didn't wait to find out; while it was still stunned from the Phalanx barrage, I fired a warhead, immediately reloaded, and fired again. The entire complex shook with the force of the powerful explosions, each equivalent in energy to a small-yield tactical nuke.

It was going to cost a fortune to fix this place.

For a split second, I saw two rapidly whipping ribbons enter my field of vision. Then I screamed in agony as I felt Unit-02's arms cut off. The pain was indescribable, like nothing else I'd ever experienced. It wasn't the terror of drowning in LCL and it wasn't the blunt throb of a punch or kick. The nerves in my arms sang in sympathy with Unit-02, as though each one were being flayed up their entire length, all the way up through my spine and brain stem. It hurt like the sound of a violin shrieking at its highest octave. Blind with pain and anger, I charged the Angel, determined to beat it to death with my skull if I had to.

And then, all at once, someone in the control room severed my connection and ejected my combat plug. I blinked in confusion as suddenly the scene of the GeoFront and the gushing of blood was replaced with one young girl, hyperventilating viscous organic fluid inside a small metal tube. My HUD went dead when my connection to Unit-02 disappeared, but I still had a comm link to the control room.

"Misato! What the fuck was that!?" I screamed.

"Unit-02 is out of commission," Misato said. "We barely got you out in time! Evacuate your plug and get to shelter as soon as you can, Rei is almost there!"

"Damn it!"

But I didn't have a choice. I don't know what happened to Unit-02, but my ability to do anything had been disrupted by the idiots in the control room. The only thing I could do now was follow their advice and flee to safety; how humiliating. It was difficult to move my arms. Even though I knew they were attached and I knew I was physically okay, they felt like alien things to me, as though I were suffering from phantom limb syndrome in reverse. My arms moved like they were asleep, and it took me several minutes to force open the door to my combat plug. Once outside, I staggered drunkenly towards the nearest blast shelter, coughing LCL the whole way.

It was a difficult walk and the shelter was almost full when I arrived. I was surrounded by the support staff of NERV; all the janitors, and mathematicians, and mechanical engineers drop everything when the first klaxons begin to wail in order to keep out from underfoot from Eva pilots like me. Everyone in the room stared at me when I keyed open the door and staggered inside. I knew I stank of the awful fluid, and I couldn't prevent myself from throwing up in one corner. No one said anything to me and everyone's attention was dominated by the screen in one corner, displaying the status of the GeoFront. I could see Unit-02 smoldering in one corner, and I grimaced at the thought of her flesh burning as she lay in a helpless heap on the ground. The elevator finally brought Rei up from the chthonic depths of the facility, and she charged the Angel the moment she was level with the terrain of the interior of the GeoFront.

For a flicker of an instant, the screen went white, and then the blast shelter rocked with the force of an explosion so intensely that we were all thrown to the ground. I think I elbowed some middle manager in the face on the way down; sorry, buddy. I have no idea what Rei did, but the status screens all went dead and I could see cracks forming in the wall of the blast shelter itself.

"W-what do we do?" some NERV drone asked, his voice quaking with fear.

"Misato!" I cried into my headset. "What's going on? What can I do?"

But whatever Rei did must have destroyed the communications relay, because the line was dead. All I could do was wait, unless… I was just about to open the door to the blast shelter and make a run for the control room, when the sounds of renewed combat opened up outside the walls. Knowing that my human body was, in itself, a very fragile thing, I sullenly waited for someone to come by and give us the all-clear. I was surrounded by useless NERV technicians, and I was just as useless as they were.

It was hours before Misato came to let us out.

She had a grim look on her face.

I was almost too afraid to ask, but I blurted it out anyway.

"Misato! Why did you eject me from Unit-02!?" I immediately shrieked the moment I saw her face, heedless of the stares of the NERV personnel surrounding us.

Misato took a deep breath.

"Asuka, Unit-02 is completely out of commission. The machinery may be repairable, but it's hard to tell if the biological components are still viable. I'm sorry."

I stared at her uncomprehendingly.

"What… what does that mean!?"

"You're on standby." Misato wouldn't look at me. "Unit-01 has been gravely damaged and Shinji isn't answering us at all. Unit-02 is … under repair. As is Unit-00."

"What the fuck is going on!? Shinji came back? What's wrong with Unit-02? Let me see her. I demand you let me see her!"

Misato looked furtive, and I could only assume the worst. Why had she ejected me without saying a thing? Misato reached down and handed me a bottle of water, which I gulped from greedily. My throat was parched to all shit from all the coughing and vomiting after coming out of LCL immersion, and the blast shelter hadn't been prepared for a long term stay and lacked food and water.

"Sorry about this, Asuka," Misato began.

"Sorry about what!?" I interrupted. "Sorry that the idiot Shinji upstaged me yet again? Sorry that Unit-02 might be _dead_!?"

"No. I'm sorry that I gave you a sedative without warning you."

I blinked, and held up the bottle. Sure enough, the water was cloudy with an unknown agent.

"Damn you, Misato!" I shrieked.

I threw the bottle at her. She didn't even move – she just let it slam into her chest and bounce away, spraying tainted water all over her uniform.

"Asuka, I need you to listen to me. I'm going to walk you to the ready room where you can go and take a long nap. I'm doing this for your own good – your body is beyond its limit and you're suffering from a dangerous amount of mental stress that could compromise your future abilities in combat. Please, just listen to me this once, okay?"

Somehow, lying down started to sound like a good choice. Damn that Misato, poisoning me.

Misato led me by the hand through the ruined guts of the GeoFront, and when I finally couldn't hold my body up any longer, she carried me. There were two great, prone forms laying under white sheets in the middle of the open chamber, and silent tears rolled down my cheeks.

"M-Misato," I gasped, "Unit-02, will she…?"

"Shh. Just go to sleep, Asuka," she murmured.

I didn't have the strength to disobey.

**End Chapter-06**


	8. 07 - Thagirion

**Chapter-07: Thagirion**

"Synch rate 12.8%!"

"Come on, Asuka! Concentrate!"

I was concentrating as hard as I could, dammit. Even though Unit-02 was allegedly fully operational, something inside her broke after the battle with Zeruel. I don't know what it means for an Evangelion to hope, but it seems like, in some strange way, Unit-02 had abandoned hope entirely. It didn't help that I was still bitter over being bested by Shinji. I tried to blank everything from my mind except for myself and the alien perception of Unit-02. For a fraction of a second, I saw out of my Evangelion's eyes. I tried to hold her field of vision in my third eye, but Misato interrupted again, breaking my concentration.

"Asuka, you're only up to 13.3%. You can do better than this!"

Something inside me snapped. I tried to get furious at Misato, and curse her out for interfering, but I found myself totally empty inside. Anger was my oldest and most reliable friend. Anger got me through a friendless childhood cooped up in my father's mansion with no one for company but the servants and my private tutors. Anger sustained me in college where I spent almost all of my time alone, studying for exams that were far beyond the capabilities of a normal child. And anger got me back on my feet whenever I was knocked down by an Angel, lifting me up and squaring my shoulders no matter how much pain I endured.

And now, that anger was gone.

Now I had nothing.

"Damn it," I heard Misato mutter. "There's nothing more we can do today, the pilots are still too agitated. Ritsuko, cut the link."

Once again I found myself alone in the test plug. Without waiting for any more instructions, I pushed open the door and jumped lightly down to the deck. I didn't even bother listening when Shinji or Rei's scores were read out; all that mattered to me were my own. And the truth was, mine weren't looking too good. I didn't say a word to the others as they huddled together to discuss the results of today's testing, and they didn't say a word to me. As soon as I could get away, I went to the locker room and changed into my street clothes. Today I was wearing an orange tank top and a khaki skirt. Whatever; it's not like I care what anyone else thinks. I rode the elevator to the surface, alone in a crowd of NERV drones headed home for the night.

I got ramen in a non-descript ramen stand near the train station. Most of the people there were NERV employees, and they drank and caroused and occasionally shot me curious glances while I slowly finished a bowl of ramen for supper. I could barely taste the rich flavors as I mechanically chewed and swallowed one bite after the next, methodically eating until my bowl was empty. I sat on a bench on a public park for the rest of the evening and thumbed back to the book I was reading – Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra. The German words comforted me, and reminded me of a home that probably only existed in my imagination, anyway.

It was autumn, and the temperature dropped precipitously the moment the sun went down. I hurried home as my arms and legs grew a field of goosepimples. Along with the cold, I felt a painful, tense sensation in my belly, and with a sinking sensation I realized I was getting my period. I hoped that I could make it home before I ended up ruining my khaki skirt with the first blood of my monthly cycle. Back in Misato's apartment, Shinji and Misato were sharing a quiet dinner in her dimly lit apartment. They didn't say anything to me as I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and ran a steaming hot bath. When I stripped off my skirt and panties, I was irritated to discover a small blot of blood right on the crotch of my underwear, but at least my skirt escaped similar destruction. I threw the pair of stained panties in the trash and covered the evidence with a pile of tissues.

Driven by some impulse I couldn't explain, I reached down, touched my labia, and drew a small smear of blood up to my nose. I smelled it and wrinkled my nose in revulsion. It stank of decay and fertility, and the smell made me sick to my stomach. I quickly washed my hands and then climbed into the overly hot tub, reveling in the pain the hot water raised in my skin. Now, of all times, I just had to get my period. I felt unable to cope.

Menstruation was a symbol of motherhood, and a mother was the last thing I wanted to be in the world. I can barely look after myself, and yet my body is already telling me that it's ready for pregnancy and progeny to continue the cycle of human life on this earth. Does my body know me at all? Does it know how much risk I have to bear, how much stress I'm required to endure? No – it just looks after its own needs and desires without giving the slightest bit of care to anything else. My body wants me to become a mother for its own sake, just like my own mother gave birth to me for no reason other than to satisfy herself. Maybe that's the truth of how the human species perpetuates, then; human life is an endless cycle of selfishness and greed that externalizes the costs of fulfilling its own needs onto others. No wonder "God" has sent these Angels down to torment us. It's no better or worse than we deserve.

I laid in the bath for a few minutes, and my pale skin turned pink as it absorbed the heat of the water. Suddenly, I realized that my menstrual blood was probably mixing with the water and drifting across all of my pores. I felt a wave of disgust that caused me to shudder despite the warmth of the water. I quickly drained the tub, then stood up and scrubbed my skin raw under the shower, more disgusted by the idea of being covered in even an infinitesimal amount of my cyclic discharge than any amount of LCL. I lathered my hair three times and rubbed my skin mercilessly with a perfumed loofa. I'd never feel truly clean again, but eventually Shinji started pounding on the bathroom door, so I got out of the shower, guided a tampon into my maidenhood with a shudder, and then left the bathroom after covering myself with a towel.

Shinji glared at me.

"What?" I demanded, dripping onto the faux wood floor.

"Are you just going to leave your clothes in a pile like that?"

I sighed.

"Whatever," I muttered, grabbing up an armful of clothes and taking them out of the bathroom with me.

I locked myself in my room, determined not to come out for the rest of the night. I tried to waste some time in a PC game but my heart really wasn't into it, and even though it wasn't even twenty one thirty, I was so physically and emotionally drained that I decided to go to bed.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that my dreams were full of nightmares.

I was a little girl again, perhaps five or six years old. My father took me to the hospital to see my mother.

"Now remember," he murmured to me. "Don't get too close to her, okay?"

"But I want to give Mutti a hug!" I objected.

He explained, "She's trying to get well, and it's important to give Mutti her space."

The doctor unlocked the door to her room, and my mother glanced over at us with dull eyes. She didn't look happy to see us; even as a child I could pick up on her disinterest and contempt. My father made a few soothing sounds to her while I put my hands on my hips and glared.

"Hello, Kyoko," my father said. "Are they treating you well?"

She nodded, but nothing about the motion of her head seemed to convey that she understood my father's question and was answering it.

"Your daughter is here to see you."

For a moment, my mother's eyes seemed to light up.

"My beautiful daughter has been with me the whole time."

She held up a doll that my parents had originally gotten me for my second birthday. It was a custom doll designed to the specifications the customer provided, and in this case, they'd based the model on me. The eye color, hair color, and face shape were all strongly reminiscent of my own form. My mother held up the doll dotingly, and I closed my eyes, stricken by the pain of betrayal and the horror of her broken mind. I was only a child and I didn't have the psychological tools to protect myself from the agony of the scene. I could barely breathe.

"Don't cry," my father hissed at me through the side of his mouth. "For your mother's sake, you mustn't cry."

I gulped down my tears and tried to follow his advice. It was too much for me to bear and I involuntarily let out a few sobs. With an audible sigh of irritation, he led me out of my mother's room and seated me on a chair in the hallway of the hospital. He locked my mother in her room behind us.

"Now, I must discuss something with your mother's physician," he explained. "I'll be back in perhaps twenty minutes. You sit here and be a good girl, okay?"

I nodded. My nose was running with snot and I didn't trust my voice to answer him.

My father went into the lady doctor's office, and I heard strange noises coming from behind the door. I wanted to go inside and see if he was alright but I was determined to sit where he instructed and be a good girl. Still, I wondered what they were doing. It sounded almost like they were fighting. How could a fight possibly help my mother get well?

The dream shifted as dreams are wont to do, and the next scene was that of my mother's funeral. I was a little older in this dream, and a little better equipped to handle the pain of her passing. I was surprised to find that I mostly didn't care. Kyoko hadn't been a mother to me in years, and her death absolved me of the chore of having her humiliate me any longer, taunting me with the love and attention she gave to a doll that was based on my own face. I wasn't exactly happy she was gone – I'd always somehow hoped that she could get well and be the mother it was her job to be – but even at that age, I'd basically written her off as already dead. Her funeral was just the dénouement of a death that she'd experienced years before.

"You can cry if you want to," my father whispered in my ear as the Shinto priest droned on about ashes and dust. "No one will look down on you if you do."

"I won't," I vowed.

My father managed to spare a sad expression for me, at least. True to my word, I didn't cry at her death. Her body was flown to Japan and buried in her hometown's graveyard, since the Catholics wouldn't allow her to be buried in a Christian way because of her suicide.

When I woke up, it was Sunday, which was supposed to be a day free both from school and also from NERV duties. Nevertheless I didn't even make it through breakfast before we all got a priority call from NERV HQ: the fifteenth Angel, designation Arael, was in Low Earth Orbit over Tokyo-3 and would have to engaged from the ground. With a groan I threw the rest of my pancakes down the garbage disposal – no sense in having even more in my stomach just to throw up later. Shinji and I walked together to the train station since Misato was already at NERV, but I ignored his fruitless attempts at conversation along the way. While we waited for the train, I decided to give Kaji a ring. Maybe I could convince him that he'd been underestimating me the whole time. If only someone like Kaji would fall in love with me, I might just have the strength to go on fighting.

To my relief, he actually picked up his phone.

"Asuka, what's going on?" he asked. "Are you on your way to fight that Angel?"

"I want to tell you something, first! Kaji, you're the only person I'll ever love!"

I realized that I'd blurted out way more than I intended, but I let the dead silence that overtook the line stand on its own. There, I said it, and if I died today I could die without the regret of failing to admit my feelings.

Kaji finally sighed. "Asuka, I know this is a difficult time in your life for you. But trust me, things _do_ get better. Life is always an emotional struggle – everyone has difficulties – but as you grow up and gain more experiences, you gain a sense of perspective, too, and you know better than think that how you feel today must be the way you'll always feel."

"I – I don't understand what you're saying!"

I was furious. Could he really be rebuffing me so easily? Didn't he know that I was about to walk into battle totally on my own without anyone to support me?

"Asuka, listen to me. I've been with dozens of women, probably hundreds. When I was your age I thought every crush was the one and only and that every time I was shot down it was the end of the world. And then I grew up and realized that love has many different manifestations. I don't deny your love for me, far from it! But I'm also old enough to recognize something you can't see from your vantage point – that you have a long life ahead of you, and it will be full of victories and defeats, passions and cold hearths. True love isn't some feeling you have. True love is years and years of hard work and mutual compromises."

I was indignant.

"What would you know about true love!?" I hissed into the speaker. "You're just some idiot gigolo!"

With that, I ended the call, letting him chew on that for awhile. I caught Shinji glancing at me and the moment he realized I could see him he turned and stared off in the other direction. Good. What right does he have to intrude on my feelings?

Damn the lot of them!

At NERV, things were surprisingly sedate. Everyone knew intellectually that an Angel in orbit was potentially just as dangerous as one on the ground, but something about the vast distance that separated earth from heaven made people a little more methodical than the chaos that had ensued when Zereul attacked. Rei and I dressed in the girl's locker room, and for a minute, we were alone on an elevator leading to the control room, pilot's ready room, and docking bay.

"Asuka."

I blinked and glanced over at the robot girl.

"What?" I demanded.

"You should treat Unit-02 as a person instead of just a machine."

I was taken aback by Rei's gall. What could an android possibly have to say about treating others like people? When in her life had Rei ever treated someone as a person, instead of just a programmer? Moved by a sudden burst of fury, I slapped her across the face. And all at once, my anger faded away again, falling between my fingers like rice through a sieve. If I didn't know better, I'd think Rei had a hurt look on her face, but I'm sure I didn't slap her hard enough to damage any of her machinery. When the elevator stopped, Rei got out and went to the ready room, while I decided to go check on Unit-02 before the battle. Her towering, grotesque form was waiting for me, scarred and disfigured by the battles.

"Hey, you!" I shouted at the thing. "Unit-02! You think you're a person!?"

Only cold silence greeted my shouts. I decided to go on anyway; there was no one around to judge me for my words.

"You're not a person at all! You're just a thing. A thing built by humans and good for nothing except combat. Nobody wants anything from you but battle and as soon as your purpose is fulfilled they'll grind you into scrap and use you to build something better!" I don't know why, but it felt good to shout. "You'll never be free, you'll never be happy, and you're nothing but a puppet for pilots like me! You're my slave! You can't even move your arm without a command for me. How could you be a person!?"

Naturally, the Evangelion didn't react at all to my words.

"It's time for you to do what I tell you! I'm tired of having to fight you each and every step of the way. If I give you an order, follow it! If I send you an impulse to move your leg, move your leg! Do what I tell you, y'hear?"

My words just echoed around the docking bay back to me.

"Fine! This is stupid anyway," I huffed.

I met up with the others in the ready room.

"Asuka, you're finally here," Misato said with a hint of an accusatory tone. "I was just explaining our strategy against Arael."

"Fine, fine," I sighed.

"You and Rei are going to confront it with positron sniper rifles," Misato explained. "I want Rei on point while you cover her flanks. Don't let it get close enough to interfere with your A.T. Fields – let the rifles do the work."

Rei startled me by speaking. "Are you sure the positron rifles will be enough to succeed? Even heavy weapons weren't enough to disrupt Zeruel's A.T. Field."

Misato sighed. "We hope so, but I can't give you 100% assurances, either. The engineers and exotic physics lab both believe this should work so it's worth trying."

"Let's just go," I muttered, furious that Misato put Rei on point instead of me.

Plugsuit, LCL immersion, interlink opening. It's the same every time and it never gets any easier. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, hoping the life support functions of the plug were also configured to deal with menstruation as well as other common human body functions. I staggered to the elevator alongside Rei, with Unit-02 fighting me every step of the way. Or maybe it's not fair to say she was even fighting me – she hardly had enough energy for that. Instead, I had to practically drag her forward, with her passivity being almost as unwieldy as open resistance.

"Asuka you're only at 14.4% synchronization! You have _got_ to get yourself under control!" Misato warned.

"It's not my fault," I hissed. "Unit-02 has been fucked ever since the battle with Zeruel. What did It _do_ to her, anyway?"

"That's classified! Just focus on your own job!"

On the surface, NERV technicians were waiting for us with the positron rifles. I made sure to wait until the teams were well clear of my Eva unit's arms before reaching down to pick it up – Unit-02 was shaking uncontrollably, and I didn't want to inadvertently injure anyone on the ground if I suddenly lost control. Why? Why wasn't she cooperating with me!? If she's supposed to be a person, why can't she listen to me!?

Since we were engaging from Tokyo-3 itself, power wasn't much of a concern. They plugged my Eva into the power grid of Japan itself, putting the energy of the entire nation at my fingertips. Finally, all preparations were complete. Rei and I faced off against the cloudy sky.

"Unit-00, Unit-02, you're cleared to engage!" Misato shouted.

I wasn't going to be overmatched by some android. I decided to ignore Misato's tactical plan and engage the Angel myself. I could prove to them that I was worthy enough to be a pilot, no matter what the cost! I couldn't see shit through the clouds, and with the Angel in orbit it would have appeared as nothing but a bright dot, anyway. I let my targeting HUD do the aiming for me and as soon as it beeped with a lock I let out a full charge of three shots burst from the barrel of my rifle, aimed directly at the heavens.

"Asuka! What do you think you're doing!?" Misato demanded furiously.

"Hurry up!" I shrieked at my rifle's power gauge, which was slowly creeping up. "Hurry up and charge, damn you!"

Suddenly, I was distracted by a strange mote of light in the center of my field of vision. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. The mote grew, and it was surrounded by an undulating nimbus of rainbow light. As it came closer, I let myself sink into it, both befuddled and overjoyed. It whispered peace and success to me and I accepted it. In the distance, I heard a song I remembered from my childhood begin to grow in intensity even though it had been playing all along. Despite the fact I'm not a Christian, Georg Friedrich Händel's Hallelujah Chorus always filled me with a sense of numinous joy.

"Yes!" I screamed.

I was totally heedless of consequences and everything had faded from my mind. Angels, Impacts, and Evangelions were all washed away, and I was a little girl again, holding up my arms and waiting to be taken up into the sky by my father's open arms. The shining light continued to grow in intensity, and I basked in Its divine radiance. After all this time, I could rest assured that there really was a God, even if it wasn't my father's god Yahweh or my mother's goddess Ameterasu. In another moment, I'd finally have the peace I spent my whole life searching for.

Then the voice of the Devil broke in.

He asked, "Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid."

"Wh-what!?" I gasped.

The Light grew relentlessly, remorselessly stronger. I gasped as ecstasy turned into undiluted agony. Where the Light had once warmed me, now it was burning, and the sound of the Hallelujah Chorus grew in volume until it was a tuneless cacophony of noise. I blindly fired my positron rifle, desperate to hit something, anything, to make this incredible agony disappeare.

A distance voice cried out, "Asuka, what are you doing!? You're hitting the city, cease fire, cease fire!"

The sound kept growing stronger and I screamed at the top of my lungs, fruitlessly trying to do something to keep all my thoughts and feelings from being consumed by the monstrous Thing. All the nerves in my body blossomed with pain as the horrific agony of the Light threatened to consume me and leave not even ashes in Its wake.

"Rei! Open fire!" someone said.

The Light and Noise continued to hit new crescendos with each successive instant. I completely lost control of Unit-02 and I scratched helplessly at my own body, unable to even tear at my skin thanks to the firm metamaterial of my gloves and plugsuit. I wanted to feel anything, even horrifying pain, anything that could remind me that I still existed and that there was still something real apart from the horrible eternity of the Light. I was blinded by Its Radiance and deafened by Its Volume. Everything else was washed away entirely, all the colors of the world bleached away into agonizing terror. I don't know how long I was obliterated upon the lathe of Heaven. I think it was forever.

After an interminable eternity, the terrible Volume and Light was suddenly cut off, leaving me all alone in a stricken Eva with my own screams still ringing in my ears. I gasped and fell forward, heedless of the destruction I caused as my Evangelion fell face-first into the streets of Tokyo-3. I screamed again, just to hear the sound of my own voice. My own existence. Then I threw up into the LCL, getting chunks of vomit in my hair along with the bloody, seminal, menstrual fluid that filled the plug.

It was with a tremendous sense of relief that I finally passed out.

When I finally came to, I was still in my plug. The LCL fluid around me was colder than usual, and I involuntarily shivered in spite of the fact that my plugsuit reflected my own warmth back into my body.

"H-hello?" I asked over the comm.

"Asuka, you're alright."

Misato sounded less enthusiastic than she really could have.

"What… happened?" I asked.

Misato answered in a clipped tone. "Rei defeated Arael and saved you. You only narrowly evaded complete psychic dissolution and a persistent vegetative coma. You should count yourself lucky to still be alive."

I closed my eyes, feeling tears welling up in the ducts of my eyes.

"If Rei saved me, I'd rather have died!" I yelled at her.

"Due to the possibility of infection, we are keeping both you and Unit-02 in temporary quarantine. I'll eject you from your combat plug if you want, but you won't be able to leave the quarantine zone for at least 72 hours while we ensure you aren't still infected by the Angelic residue. Do you understand?"

I tried not to cry. "Yes."

"Well?"

"Go ahead and eject me."

I barely felt it when the combat plug popped out and was carried down to the surface of the specialized quarantine dock. I was almost relieved by the pain of puking out bile on the metal deck; it was so visceral, so human, that it almost caused the burn on the surface of my psyche to fade into the background for a few minutes.

**End Chapter-07**


	9. 08 - And the First Shall be Last

**Chapter-08: And the First Shall be Last**

I got the impression that NERV was as inconvenienced by my time in quarantine as I as. The quarantine cage had been designed to incarcerate an out-of-control Eva and there were no human-centric facilities available in the spacious but largely empty room. NERV technicians scrambled to get me meals, entertainment, and – ugh – a portable toilet. I came to miss the ubiquitous Japanese bidet almost immediately. For my part, I spent most of my time zoning out in front of a small television, sleeping, or curled up on a futon trying not to ruminate on my future. The quarantine cage also lacked a shower. It didn't take long after coming out of the LCL before I stank to high heaven, and I sympathized with Misato when she finally came to get me; I could tell by her wrinkled nose that I wasn't just imagining things.

"Come with me, please," she instructed.

I followed the Major without enthusiasm. Considering all of the things that had happened during our battle against Arael, the best I could hope for was a severe lecture. The worst possibility I didn't want to even contemplate. The boots of my plugsuit clanged against the metal deck as I walked, and I swore the first thing I was going to do after taking a shower was to have this suit burned.

Misato led me into her office and gestured for me to sit in a chair. She locked the door behind us.

"Asuka." Her voice was level.

I refused to look her in the eyes. "What?"

"Your reckless behavior endangered not only yourself and not only the other pilots, but in fact you endangered everyone on the entire planet. What do you have to say for yourself?"

I took a deep breath and let it out.

"I made what I believed to be the best tactical choice in the situation. I underestimated the combat potential of Arael and I almost paid for it with my life. I'm not stupid; I understand what happened."

"You're just telling me what you think I want to hear," Misato replied, shaking her head in exasperation. "I don't believe for one second you really understand the implications of what you've done."

"Whatever. If you're going to punish me, punish me. If you're going to fire me, fire me. Otherwise, I don't see what we have to gain by having this conversation. I've had three days alone in quarantine to think about what happened and I don't need to hear any more of your criticism to know that I made a mistake. My ears are still ringing from that stupid Angel – I can't get it out of my head!"

Misato slid a tablet across the table to me. I glanced down at the glowing screen, and saw a chart of my synchronization scores, both in testing and in combat. The trend was unmistakable. My average synchronization ratio had been dropping for quite some time.

I felt cold inside.

"I'm aware, Misato."

"You're not the only candidate for piloting Unit-02, you know," she told me.

"What… what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that it's not fair for NERV to put you at risk. If you can't live up to your full combat potential, putting you in battle is just throwing your life away, along with the equipment and financial investment we've entrusted you with. I have no say in this decision, Asuka. Gendo has ordered that if you can't bring your synch rate above 30% in the next series of tests, you'll be put on standby and another pilot will be trained to be the primary for Unit-02."

I wasn't crying, but I felt a tear roll down my cheek anyway.

"What the Hell is this, Misato?" I demanded.

"I think I've been entirely clear with you."

"Damn you!" I was livid and I didn't even know why. "This is all _your_ fault, Misato! How many battles have I fought and won so far? And the moment I make a mistake, you're the first person in the world to put me in front of the bus! I don't need this and I don't need you."

She just watched me impassively, and that made me even angrier. I slammed her desk with my hands.

"I've had it! I'm making my own decisions now," I fumed. "First, there's no way I'm going to live with you anymore! And you know what? I'm not going back to that stupid school, either! Maybe the reason I'm having so much trouble synching with Unit-02 is that I'm not even a real person myself since NERV scripts every day of my life for me in advance. I'm not blindly following your orders any longer. Do you understand, Misato!?"

"I understand, Asuka," Misato replied coolly. "I don't care what you do with your life - just get your numbers up."

"Fine!"

I unlocked the door and stormed out of Misato's office. My welfare doesn't matter one wit to her, and this was the last straw proving it. I made one mistake – just one. And her response was to threaten me with replacement?

I got on an elevator with several technicians, and they carefully looked at the walls in a way that told me that they hadn't yet become acclimated to my… uh, scent. Three days percolating in LCL and stray bits of vomit didn't do anything for my complexion either. I guess I wasn't going to impress anyone for awhile. As soon as the elevator hit my floor, I half-ran to the locker room and stripped off the awful suit. I turned the shower on steaming, and without a second look at the NERV drones showering I let the hot liquid sluice off days of sweat and caked-on LCL.

I must have scrubbed for an hour before I felt clean enough to even consider getting out. My hair was a frizzed, tangled nightmare, and no amount of combing seemed to be enough to get it cleaned and straightened. For the first time, I seriously considered hacking it all off. I'd always believed that my hair was my crowning glory, but now it was just getting in the way and it smelled of LCL for long after I got all the sticky filth off my skin. Before I could make a drastic decision, I got out of the shower, toweled, off, and put on the outfit I wore to the facility three days ago. I was amazed that it had been that long, because it seemed like it had taken forever.

On the train, I phoned up Hikari.

"Oh, Asuka!" She was the first person who'd been genuinely glad to talk to me in ages. "What's going on? I haven't seen you in days!"

I mumbled in reply, "Complications at NERV. Actually, I was hoping to ask you a favor."

"What's that?"

I could easily afford to stay at a hotel, but I didn't want to be alone. And Hikari's cheerful tone made me hopeful that she could provide me with something entirely alien to Misato or Shinji – emotional support.

"I had a little falling out with Misato. If you still have a spare room in your house, I'd really appreciate a place to stay for a little while."

"Of course, Asuka! I'll help you in any way that I can."

"Thanks. It really means a lot to me. Will you be home in, say, two hours?"

"Sure thing. I'll see you there."

I hung up the phone feeling a little better. Two hours should give me enough time to get my things packed and over to Hikari's; apart from my clothes, laptop, and a few electronic gadgets, I really didn't bring much with me to Japan. When I entered Misato's empty apartment I felt a strange sense of melancholy. Somehow, I knew that it was going to be the last time I came to visit, and even though I felt profoundly betrayed by Misato I could probably still think of some reason to be grateful to her, if I tried really hard. I rapidly packed my belongings into the luggage I'd initially brought to Tokyo-3. I was going to end up leaving behind a random accumulation of junk, but maybe Shinji could get some use from it. I made sure to pat Pen-Pen on the head one last time, eliciting a curious squawk, and then I left my key to Misato's apartment on the coffee table for real this time and headed out the door into the darkened hallway.

It was just before rush hour and the train station was almost empty. I had to wait a full ten minutes before the next train came and disgorged a tribe of indistinguishable salarymen into Misato's neighborhood. I dragged my luggage aboard and watched Misato's apartment building finally recede through the window of the train. Hikari's station was only three stops down the line, and virtually equidistant from NERV HQ so I had no reason to feel guilty about moving far from my job. I'd only been to her house a couple times, but my excellent sense of direction led me to her door without a single wrong turn, and after ten minutes of lugging my bags through the narrow streets I made it to her house and rang the front doorbell.

"Asuka!" Hikari really did seem happy to see me. "I'm glad you came."

"I really appreciate you doing this for me."

Hikari made a face. "My older sister is going to college overseas, and my father is in China with his job for months at a time. Nozomi is going through that phase where she just wants to be left alone and to pretend that she's an adult who doesn't need anything from her oniisan. To tell you the truth, I get lonely sometimes and it'll be really good to have someone my own age to talk to. Oh, but I've been rude! Please come in."

I followed her up to an empty upstairs room, which contained only a futon and a small desk.

"This used to be Kodama's room, but she has an apartment in London and might be staying there permanently," Hikari explained. "I'm sure she'd be happy to know that someone is still getting some use from it!"

I set down my bags with a clunk. "Thanks Hikari."

She gave me a hug, which I returned awkwardly.

"Ugh, no offense, but what's that perfume you're using?" she asked.

"Oh that's…" I sighed. "That's the scent of my job, I'm afraid. They immerse us in this breathable liquid and it takes days to get the smell out."

"Try tea tree oil. I've got some in my shower, and it works wonders for getting out weird odors. Anyway, I'm going to go start dinner. Is oden okay?"

"Thanks, Hikari, that would be great. Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Just get yourself settled in for now. I could use some help with the dishes after dinner, though."

She left me alone with my baggage and my thoughts. I quickly broke out my laptop and got it connected to her home wifi network; it still remembered the password from the last time I stayed the night with Hikari. I quickly hung up my clothes so they wouldn't get too wrinkled, and it reminded me of the months I'd spent living out of luggage while following my father around the world. The window of Kodama's room looked out into a small walled garden; evidently, the Horaki family was doing quite well for itself. On the other hand, after the mass deaths of the Second Impact and the wars that followed, the price of real estate had dropped precipitously from its highs in the 1990s. Plus, it was an open secret that something about Tokyo-3 was disproportionately drawing the Angels' attention, and it took a brave – or stupid – soul to invest in Tokyo real estate in such an uncertain time. I could hear Hikari's singing echoing up the staircase, and I smiled in spite of myself.

Hikari called up to me that dinner was ready just as I finished hanging up my clothes in Kodama's closet. I hurried downstairs after putting on a little rosewater perfume to try to cover up the lingering scent of LCL. A big steaming bowl of oden sat in the center of the kitchen table, and I eagerly took my chair with a watering mouth.

"Itadakimasu!" we said in unison.

"Hey, what's this?" I asked, waving a fork at Hikari accusingly.

"Oh, I just thought you might be more comfortable with Western-style utensils."

I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. "Chopsticks are fine."

"Oh, okay."

We made small talk about the weather, about boys, and about the recent events that had shaken Tokyo-3 to its very core. Then I dropped a bomb on the conversation without realizing it.

"So I also told Misato I wasn't going back to school," I announced in the middle of a monologue about what had brought me to Hikari's doorstep.

The girl was aghast. "What!?"

Oh. Of course. To the naturally studious Japanese, dropping out of school was an offense bordering on blasphemy.

"Well, I already have a degree from Universtät Bonn, and I know enough Kanji now to communicate fairly effectively. I just don't see a need to waste my time in classes anymore," I answered with a casual shrug. "I'll always have a job waiting for me at my father's company, and enough inheritance to live on for the rest of my life. I guess I just realized that I don't need to do things that I don't want to do anymore. I can't believe it took me this long to figure that out."

Hikari stared into her soup bowl.  
"I guess you're right, Asuka," she said with a forced laugh.

The kitchen was too small for me to help much with the dishes, but I dried them for Hikari while she scrambled to clean up all of the post-dinner mess. We watched some Japanese television together before Hikari turned in for bed. I discovered that she owned the latest game in the Fallout series, and with a lingering sense of irony I explored the Hawaiian Wastes as the Lone Wanderer until late in the night.

My alarm woke me up at oh seven hundred hours. I cursed myself for forgetting to disable the now-unnecessary summoning to class, and I turned it off and went back to sleep until noon.

After a long but unrefreshing sleep, I got up and went back to the Fallout game. It was engrossing, and the entire Hawaiian island chain was rendered in bright colors and high definition, providing dozens of hours of exploration alone. Playing a roguish character, I snuck, stole, pick pocketed, and then put on an air of contrived innocence whenever I was asked to complete a quest. I was astonished when Hikari's key rattled in the lock, and I looked at the clock to discover it was already sixteen hundred hours. Hikari stepped in and looked at my nest on the couch with some surprise.

"Asuka, have you been playing that all day?"

I just shrugged.

"It helps me take my mind off of things," I admitted.

Hikari hung up her book bag and came over to give me a serious glance.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

I don't know why I was blurting everything out to her all of a sudden.

"I just feel useless, that's all," I explained. "I don't have a real job and the only thing that I can do to make a difference doesn't seem to need me any more. Misato says that if I can't get my numbers up they're going to take me off Unit-02, but they didn't even call me in for synchronization tests today. I'm only fifteen but my life is already over. Honestly - what's the point of going on?"

Hikari reached down and gave me a hug. "You did your best, Asuka. It's okay."

"Let's just start dinner," I sniffed, barely able to hold back tears.

That night and the next day and the next night went on just like that. I listlessly helped around the house or went shopping, and spent the rest of my time engrossed in Fallout. If I couldn't be a real hero, maybe I could at least pretend to be a digital one. I became more and more unnerved as NERV continued not to call. Had I been dismissed as a pilot without even being told? I cried bitterly for a half hour as I contemplated that possibility.

When I finally heard the ringtone of NERV's emergency line the next afternoon, I'd almost forgotten what it sounded like. Hesitantly, I put down the Playstation controller and picked up my phone.

"What is it?" I asked.

I was surprised by Misato's voice. It was the same as ever.

"The sixteenth Angel has appeared, designation Armisael. Please come to HQ ASAP."

"Okay," I answered mechanically before hanging up the phone.

On the train, I couldn't understand what I was feeling. I felt so useless spending my days idling around Hikari's house and playing video games, yet now that I was being called back into action I could only feel a stomach-turning sense of overwhelming revulsion. I was disgusted with the Angels, disgusted with NERV, and most of all, disgusted with myself. If I fucked up this time they were going to take Unit-02 away from me and give it to some stranger. How had I fallen so far? I couldn't understand it. My mind felt dull and empty.

I got suited up in a fresh plugsuit and headed down to the control room to debrief with Rei and Shinji.

"Good, you're all here." Misato seemed to be looking at me directly. "Armisael has been acting very strangely and is currently over Tokyo-3. It doesn't seem to be acting aggressively, but that's obviously just a cover for some strategy we haven't yet deciphered. Please get in your Evas immediately and prepare for deployment. Shinji, Rei, you will take the lead on this operation. Asuka, I'm holding you in reserve. Do you understand?"

I could hear what she was really saying; _Don't you dare pull the same shit as last time or you're through, Asuka._

"Yes," I answered distantly.

"Good. Get to the dock at once."

The three of us walked in mutually incomprehensible silence as we made our way to our combat plugs. Just as ever, Ayanami Rei had all the warmth of a stucco wall, but even Shinji seemed to be lost in his own mind. It was obvious to me how much of a toll this war against the Angels was taking on us, and I hoped that I didn't show the stress as badly as the others. Of course, I almost certainly did. The moment I stepped into my combat plug I felt my heart start to race painfully in my chest. I had a flashback to the ruthless mental assault waged by Arael and it was all I could do to force my protesting body into the plug and seal the door behind me.

I was already on the verge of having a full blown panic attack, and the steady rise of LCL inside the plug was only making it worse. I gasped the shrinking supply of air, trying to gulp down enough that I could make it through the whole battle without having to breathe any more of the repugnant, sickeningly biological liquid. It was impossible, of course, and soon I was thrashing with the characteristic terror of drowning which I'd come to know and hate so well. People get waterboarded as a form of torture but actually being drowned in the fluid was worse. No amount of oxygenation can prevent the feeling of foreign liquid filling my lungs, gagging me, drowning me. I heaved, got a lungful of LCL, coughed uncontrollably to expel it and only ended up sucking down more.

When I finally was under enough control to get my headset on, the results were not encouraging.

"Asuka's body is experiencing dangerous amounts of stress," Ritsuko said. "She's on the verge of going into shock."

"Stay with us, Asuka," Misato murmured.

"What's my synch rate?" I finally managed to subvocalize through my throat mic.

"Don't worry about it," Misato responded. "Just be prepared for battle."

Shinji and Rei went up first, while Misato kept me on standby on the elevator, to be deployed to combat only in an emergency. I rankled bitterly about both the demotion and her lack of faith in me. Still, the only way I could redeem myself now was to follow her orders to the letter, and succeed at any task I was set to.

"What's it _doing_?" Shinji asked over the open comm.

"Keep your distance," Misato advised. "The MAGI are still trying to work out what its strategy is. Don't let it box you in."

Rei said, "Requesting permission to engage."

"Negative. Stay a klick away and keep it in your sights. Standby for engagement instructions."

Since I didn't have to wield a weapon yet myself, I watched the CIC computer display with interest. The Angel looked like it was feinting at Rei in preparation for a strike, but it moved exceptionally slowly, undulating along its ring-like body like a snake. For her part, she kept her weapon aimed and raised, but was patiently waiting for Misato's permission to fire upon it. Shinji moved off to the right, trying to flank it. If only Misato would let me go out, I could cover the left flank and encircle it! Of course, she didn't trust me enough for that – not anymore. I tried to maintain my composure while the Angel just floated gracefully in empty space.

With breathtaking suddenness, Armisael lunged, and it darted faster than I ever could have believed after observing its previous movements. The Angel was on Unit-00 in an instant, and Rei opened fire with her positron rifle even as Misato screamed to fire over the open channel. I could only watch helplessly as Armisael tore into Unit-00 like a cheap toy, and then Shinji, the idiot, charged the Angel and started whaling on its body with his progressive knife. I fidgeted in my combat plug, waiting for permission to assist.

Misato's voice soon interrupted my anxiety.

"Asuka, I'm sending you up. Destroy that Angel!"

"Okay. I can do this," I promised.

Unit-02 vibrated as the elevator slowly crawled towards the surface. I tried to connect to her mind and was astonished to find her totally blank. It was like she was gone, leaving nothing but empty space where I normally found her consumed by inner turmoil. Had Unit-02 somehow died, yet her body kept alive by NERV's bizarre life support technologies? I grew increasingly concerned as we came nearer and nearer to the surface. Though I was the one who sent the impulses to move Unit-02's arms and legs, somehow it was her mind that translated my thoughts into the actual movements of the Eva's limbs. If Unit-02's mind was gone, what would turn my will into action? When we finally hit the surface I discovered the answer.

I tried to raise my rifle and squeeze off a few quick shots just to grab the Angel's attention, but to my horrified astonishment nothing happened. There was no connection between us anymore, and I couldn't tell if she had lost her mind or I was just locked out of it entirely. I screamed and furiously shook my head, trying to clear whatever interference was coming between us as though through will alone.

"Misato!" I howled. "What's going on?"

Her voice came back to me, surprisingly calm. "Asuka, your synch rate is 1.2%. At that rate, you won't even be able to move your Evangelion's limbs. I'm pulling you back."

"No! I can still fight!" I shrieked furiously.

It was no use. The elevator started moving beneath Unit-02's feet, and I couldn't get her to move off of it to stay in the battle. I was completely paralyzed, locked in, and all my dreams of heroism were evaporating right in front of my eyes.

"Damn it! Damn it damn it damn it damn it!"

It was no use. My connection with Unit-02 was dead.

I could only watch the CIC screen helplessly as the battle on the surface continued to unfold. Shinji managed to get Armisael's attention, and the filthy monster was changing its shape to interface with the surface of Unit-01, sending out things like tentacles to try to penetrate the Evangelion's armor. I was furious at my own impotence and when Unit-00 shoved Shinji out of the way to bear the brunt of the Angel's attack, my heart sank into my toes. All this work, all this training, all this effort and I couldn't do anything but watch as my companions got torn apart. Even if I didn't have much love for either of them, their defeat would cover me with the indelible stink of failure, and that was a smell more grotesque and more permanent than even the reek of LCL.

Then there was a large explosion, and the CIC computer read only: **Signal Lost**

"Misato! What the Hell happened?" I demanded.

Misato's voice was distant. I'm not sure she even knew who was asking her the question.

"We have life signs from the pilot of Unit-01. Shinji is shaken but his vital signs are still strong. Unit-00 self-destructed and no trace of the pilot's vitals remain."

"What!?" I was aghast. "Are you saying Rei is dead?"

"We are sending a containment squad to the site now to confirm that for certain."

"But that means – "

"Shut up, Asuka," Misato finally said. "I have work to do."

Some NERV technicians unceremoniously dumped me out of my combat plug, and for the next half hour, I coughed and sobbed uselessly into some drone's shoulder. I couldn't believe it. I didn't love Rei. I didn't even like her. As far as I was concerned, she was a creepy, unpleasant android marring the UncannyValley with her presence. Nevertheless, I couldn't help but feel that her death was partially on my hands, and even if I didn't like her that still made me a failure. I was a failure and there was permanent evidence of it blown into one of the eastern neighborhoods of Tokyo-3. I'd been aboard Unit-02, the most advanced combat machine ever designed by human beings, and I wasn't even able to get it to move. I felt worse than I'd ever felt in my entire life.

Everyone was too busy dealing with the aftermath of Unit-00's self-destruction to even notice about me. So, I went back to the locker room, quickly showered, and then put my street clothes back on without saying a word to another person. It was obvious that nobody really cared about me, and now that I wasn't any good for piloting Unit-02, there was no more reason to give me the time of day.

Moved by some unknowable impulse, I took a taxi to as close to the scene of Unit-00's spectacular self-destruction as the driver would dare. I paid him and sent him away, and I found myself alone in an evacuated suburban neighborhood full of half-ruined houses. People left in a hurry when the air raid sirens went off, and then hadn't returned to collect their meager belongings from a space potentially contaminated by the remains of an Angel. Losing everything you owned, the empty neighborhood whispered to me, was a small price to pay to avoid coming face to face with an Angel. Or, perhaps, to avoid coming face to face with yourself.

I knocked on the front door of one house that was missing its entire east wall. I wasn't surprised when no one answered. I hopped the fence and then climbed into the exposed kitchen. There were still half-eaten bowls on the kitchen table, now filled with broken bits of plaster as well as the family's meal. I picked up a kitchen knife from its place on the counter and tested its blade with my finger, drawing a single drop of blood from the pad of my pointer. Now that I'm no longer useful as a pilot, I'm already as good as dead. Now I'm just another helpless civilian, running from God's righteous judgment and hiding like a coward.

Why bother living?

Jean Paul Sartre once said that the only serious philosophical question of human life was whether to commit suicide. Whether the unbearable agony of living was somehow made worth it through human realization of intangible values like love, happiness, and peace. All at once I decided that it wasn't. Ideas like those are just media inventions, designed to keep people docile and working for corporations without complaint. As long as they can find satisfaction in glittering generalities like those, they'd never search for what set them apart from the rest of humanity and made them special. In contrast, I _knew_ what set me apart from the common masses; I was unique due to my skill as a pilot. And now that it was gone, I had nothing but the promise of these artificial values to keep me going.

In short, what's the point?

I explored the rest of the house, with the sharp knife still in my hand. I could hear helicopters thundering overhead as Ritsuko's containment team was busy burning all of the remains of the Angel so that it couldn't possibly resurrect. The air would be busy with traffic for the next few hours. I still stank of LCL, so I decided to take a bath in the half-ruined house; it's not like there was anyone left around at ground level to see me. I tested the water and was pleasantly surprised to discover that both the water and the water heater were still working. I guess some of the neighborhood services survived the explosion, which had taken place over three kilometers away. I stripped down, left the knife on the seat of the toilet, and sank into the tub.

Sartre ultimately concluded that life was worth living, and he comforted himself with those generalities that I wholeheartedly rejected. But still, as an honest man he recognized that his choice wasn't universally applicable, and that everyone had to make their own determination. I decided to carry my thoughts to their logical conclusion. I was useless, I couldn't contribute anything, and my life was no longer worth living. Did I really have the courage to stand by my conviction? I tested the heft and sharpness of the blade once more. I'd failed at everything so far. Did I really have the courage to face the consequences of my determination? I decided that I did. I might not be able to pilot Unit-02, but the one thing I can still do is rise above the level of total hypocrisy. Overwhelmed with righteous indignation, I slashed down each of my wrists with the blade.

It hurt, but not as much as I expected it would. The warm water of the bath helped. I sank down into the tub, closed my eyes, and waited to sink into the last honest darkness I would ever know.

**End Chapter-08**

[Author:] I won't let it end like this! Stay tuned, because the next chapter is coming soon.


	10. 09 - The Depth and the Profundity

**Chapter-09: The Depth and The Profundity**

I was surprised when I woke up at all, and more surprised to discover myself in a Spartan hospital room with an armful of IVs. Moving my arm was almost as difficult as struggling against Unit-02, but I was eventually able to shift it far enough to hit the button that called the nurse. A tight lipped woman soon came to my bedside, and she looked down on me disapprovingly.

"Where am I?" I croaked through a long-unused throat.

The nurse replied, "Yokosuka Naval Hospital."

I leaned back and closed my eyes. "Damn."

"I'm going to contact Major Kisarugi," the nurse said. "Don't go anywhere."

The joke's on her. I couldn't get up if I tried.

I discovered that they'd left me with a morphine button, which seemed rather extravagant, but that didn't stop me from jabbing it a few times until I felt a warm rush of buttery light flow into my veins and improve my mood considerably. I took stock of everything I could remember. I'd gone to the site of Unit-00's spectacular self-destruction, and then, in a pique of righteous anger, I'd tried to take my own life as a final, desperate stab from Hell's heart into the injustices of life. It seemed sort of funny now. To tell you the truth, I was a little embarrassed. I savored the endorphins flooding my brain until the Major showed up. She looked somewhat the worse for wear.

"Soryu Asuka Langley," she muttered, shaking her head when she saw me. "I can't believe you sometimes."

"Sorry." I wasn't sure if I was being honest or not. "How on Earth did you find me?"

"You're a valuable employee to NERV."

"That doesn't answer my question."

Misato shrugged. "When you first started in the Evangelion program, you were implanted with a vital signs monitor and a GPS tracking device. When we saw your vitals dropping and your inexplicable presence near the site of Unit-00's destruction, we sent a helicopter to extract you immediately."

"Oh."

This was new information to me, but somehow, it didn't surprise me at all.

I finally added, "I'm surprised you bothered."

She didn't say anything for a minute.

"I'm sorry, too," Misato said, standing at the window of my hotel room and gazing out on the city beyond. "I feel responsible for this. We never should have gotten you children involved. We should have found another way."

We shared a small silence, each lost in our own thoughts.

"So what comes next?" I finally asked.

"Events are… speeding up," Misato finally answered. "If you want, I'll have you transferred to the medical facility at NERV. After everything that's gone on, you may as well come back to see whatever happens with your own eyes, even if you can't pilot in this condition."

"No. I think I want some time… to think."

This time, I really meant it.

"Okay, Asuka." Misato shook her head and I couldn't tell what she was really thinking. "Is there anything else you wanted to say? I have a helicopter waiting for me on the roof and I have to return to NERV HQ as soon as possible."

"No. Well… maybe. I don't really know how to say what I think; in fact, I don't know what I think at all. So I guess the only thing I can say, is… thank you. I know that things have been difficult, and I know you did your best."

"Believe it or not, it comforts me to hear you say that, Asuka. I'd better go."

I watched her as she strode out of my hospital room and towards the elevator. As for me, what more was there for me to do? I couldn't pilot Unit-01, I couldn't do anything to help NERV, and for that matter, I couldn't even stand up. I laid back down into my pillow and went to sleep.

The human body usually sleeps in this way: in the beginning of the night, you have your deepest and most biologically refreshing period of sleep. After four or five hours, you switch over to REM. That's when you have most of your dreams, and occasionally even stranger experiences. Every so often I felt a little like I did when I could successfully pilot Unit-01, like I was in another body that I could only loosely control. When I was in that body, I could do extraordinary things. I could jump great distances, for instance, and sometimes I could outright fly. I could conjure fireballs and icicles and lightning to combat mysterious foes. It didn't happen every night, but when it did, I usually spent the next day deeply pondering it.

So I was startled when I appeared in a dream-world completely conscious and feeling totally like myself. In wonderment, I looked down at my arms and peered curiously at the tiny, peach-colored hairs that betray my mammalian heritage. I'd never been so conscious inside a dream before – and it was clear that the environment _was_ a dream, or something like it. I was in a big bubble of pinkish light, with glowing rainbows reflected back at me like the sheen of oil on a sunny day. I pinched myself and didn't wake up. Perplexed, I turned around, trying to understand what was happening to me.

"Instrumentality has begun," a voice that sounded like the P.A. at NERV announced.

"What!?" I demanded. "What does that mean?"

But there was no answer.

I wasn't frightened, but I was growing increasingly anxious just because I was totally perplexed by what was going on. Had something gone wrong back in the hospital? Was I truly dying instead of the false death I'd tried to inflict upon myself at the crater left by Unit-00? I decided to do something useful with my rising anxiety and transform it into anger. The back of my neck prickled with the feeling of being watched, and I turned around again, trying to find the source of the heavy gaze. I couldn't believe what I saw.

It was a person, and she looked... she looked... she looked just like me. The same long, auburn hair. The same blue eyes. The same supple breasts. I hated her immediately.

She spoke.

"Soryu Asuka Langley. Shinji-kun does not determine your fate."

I don't know how, but I discovered I had a spear, like a miniature Lance of Longinus pressed into my hand. I was furious at her imposition, and that she stole my own face when she came to accuse me. I leveled the point at my evil twin's breast.

"How dare you say that to me!?" I shrieked.

She responded with my own voice. "How long have you blamed others for your self-imposed misfortunes? How long have you cursed them for your own behavior?"

"Who..." I was aghast. "Who the Hell are you!?"

"I think you already know."

I was terrified, and I refused to listen to any more of her lies. I rushed her, swiping at her stolen face with the spear I was holding. She disappeared, and I looked wildly to my left and my right, trying to figure out where she'd gone. Suddenly a voice - my own voice - whispered in my ear.

"When will you accept me for who I am?" she asked.

"Never!"

I spun on my heel and tried to stab her where she'd just been standing. Yet again, she effortlessly evaded my strike.

"Damn you!" I screamed.

And then, perhaps five meters ahead of me, there she was again. She smiled at me sadly. Despite the fact that she wore a body identical to my own, I could tell there was something profoundly different about her. In her eyes I saw pain instead of confidence, and love where I possessed only - no. I shook my head, trying desperately to dispel the idea. Every time I blinked, it seemed like I was looking at something very different from a mere clone of myself. The Other Asuka grew gossamer wings, and then I opened my eyes again and discovered that they had disappeared. She looked like me, but each time I blinked it was as through seeing myself in a strange funhouse mirror; one moment she was wearing a diaphanous toga, the next she was wearing my public school uniform. In a couple of those strange instants I even observed that she was naked. Helpless to stop myself, my eyes were drawn to the shameless display of her pubic bush, stolen from my own body. And every time my eyes opened again, I just saw my own eyes staring back at me. I was infuriated at her gall.

"I hate you!" I howled, stabbing fruitlessly at the place just in front of where she stood. "I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you!"

She jumped backwards without moving, time and time again. It was as though she was teleporting. The physics of the strange, dreamlike environment seemed to have no hold on her.

She said, "Asuka. I love you."

"No! I won't allow it! I won't accept it!"

No matter how hard I tried, she anticipated my every move and I only swiped across empty space.

"How much have you blamed on Shinji-kun?" a voice whispered in my ear. "How much have you tried to foist on Misato-san? On Kaji-san? You've blamed everyone else for your own failings - do you really think that's how you become a grown-up?"

I didn't know what to say. Tears streamed down my cheeks, no matter how hard I managed to swallow my sobs.

"It's not fair!" I cried out. "It's not fair that I endure so much! I never asked for this. Everything in my life - my whole existence - I wish I could just take it all back!"

"What if you tried to love yourself?"

I shook with pain and fear and agony. What could this imposter be talking about?

"You have sinned," she said gently. "You have substituted arrogance for self-respect, contempt for relationships, and suicide for compassion. What right do you have to criticize Shinji? Everything you think you hate about him is really what you hate about yourself."

I was crying. I was dying.

"And what do you expect me to do?" I asked pleadingly.

"I wish you would forgive yourself."

I found myself breathing hard, exhausted by the stress and the fruitless attempts to stab the false me.

"If you're so superior, why don't you just kill me?!" I demanded angrily.

"I won't strike you."  
"So self-righteous!" I snorted. "Is that really the best you can do?"

She appeared in front of me again, and gestured at the Lance of Longinus.

"Is that the best _you_ can do?" she echoed back to me.

I was stymied. I couldn't hurt her, and she wouldn't even give me the satisfaction of trying to hurt me. It was a pointless impasse. I decided to take a different approach, and I lowered the tip of the Spear towards the bottom of the bubble. It vanished from my hand.

"What is this place? What's going on?" I asked.

"This is the outcome of millennia of hard work on the part of human beings. This is the end of all things, the apotheosis. You may call it the Rapture, or the Singularity, or Ragnarok, if you'd like. This is the hypostasis of human teleology."

"And why… why am _I_ here? What am I supposed to be doing?"

She cocked her head. "Everyone is here. Can't you hear their voices?"

I strained my ears as hard as I could, but I could only hear my own breathing and the ringing of my heartbeat in my ears. Apart from the sounds of our own bodies, it was the most complete silence I'd ever experienced in my life.

"No! I can't hear anything."

"Did He not say? 'To you has been given the Mystery of the Kingdom of God, but those who are Outside get everything in parables, so that while seeing, they may see but not comprehend, and while hearing they may hear but not understand, lest they repent and be forgiven.'"

"Don't be quoting that Bible shit to me," I mumbled in response. "That's not _my_ cultural heritage."

"Try this, then. 'The truths which can be said are not the eternal Truth, and the names that can be written are not the immortal Name. That which is unnamable is the eternally Real; naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the Mystery. Caught in desire, you see only manifestations.'"

"You're just blabbering nonsense." But I wasn't really so certain.

"Here, there, and everywhere are all the same place. Human beings have at last accepted the possibility of transcendence."

"That's… that's not what I want!" I was aghast. "I don't want to be reduced to fragments of psyche in some kind of spiritual goo!"

"What do you want, Soryu Asuka Langley?" she asked with my own voice.

I was flummoxed by the question. "What do you mean by that!?"

"I ask you without rancor, accusation, or irony; what is it you want?"

I took a deep breath. Why was I so frightened by such a simple question?

"I want… I want to live a happy life!" I cried out loud. "I want to live and fight and work and love! I want to get into arguments and have friends and sometimes drink too much!"

"Then why don't you?" Other Asuka asked, without discernable emotion.

"Because… I don't know! Because I'm afraid."

"What are you afraid of?"

I sighed. "Dying unfulfilled. Screwing everything up. Becoming useless and being thrown aside. I don't even care if people only use me, just so long as I'm the best, no matter what!"

"Look," she said, pointing at a tiny mote of light at the bottom of the sphere.

I looked down, and saw that the point of light was actually a blue marble floating in space. It was the entire Earth, laid out before me like the most intricate pearl. I gasped in astonishment; it was beautiful. There was a ladder of shining lights coming up from the planet, and some were headed up into the bubble, and others were headed back down towards the surface of the sphere. With a chill in my spine, I realized I was looking at human souls.

"What does this mean?" I asked, thoroughly befuddled.

The Other Asuka came up and put her hand on my shoulder. I turned, and got lost in my own deep blue eyes.

"It means there is a world of possibilities stretching out before you, off into the distant horizon. What do you want to do?"

I sighed. "I want… I want to go home. If I stay here, the hard work of understanding and coming to term with others – with coming to terms with myself – will all get done for me. If I ever want to really grow as a person, I have to go back, and live and struggle and die alongside other people. Instrumentality is a cop-out, engineered by a corrupt cabal of aristocrats who never really tried to understand other people. They said they wanted to help human beings but they never even understood what we were. If they had, they would have realized how unnecessary this all was."

"Go and see."

I looked back down at the planet and I gasped in astonishment. The red oceans, which had been polluted with the filth of the Angels for almost my entire life, were slowly healing themselves. The red ichor was sucked up the ladder of souls and back into the great bubble that served as my cocoon. The sea gave up its dead, purifying itself, until once again it was the sapphire blue that I knew only from photographs and the melancholy stories of my father. I felt something on my cheek, and I was astonished to discover that I was crying.

The Other Asuka kissed me on the lips, and I was too stunned to move. I could feel the warmth and softness of her lips pressing into mine, and I could smell rosewater perfume and the faint scent of human girl clearly despite the strange environment. She released me, and I stared at her, as lost and confused as I'd ever been.

"Return, Soryu Asuka Langley," she said.

With a strong rushing sensation, I found myself falling at great speed towards the surface of the planet. Terrified that I would burn up in the atmosphere, I screamed, but it was to no avail. I plummeted down to the Earth, and an instant before I hit the ground I woke up in my hospital bed heaving with terror. I sat up so rapidly that I got a headache from the sudden loss of blood to my head. I had no idea what happened, and my heart was pounding fiercely in my chest.

When I finally regained my composure, I was moved by some unknowable impulse, and I turned my arms over and looked at the scarred gashes from when I'd tried to take my own life. Another astonishing event in a day filled with them – the marks were completely gone. In fact, I felt well enough to stand, to run, and very nearly to fly. Without waiting for the nurse I tore the IV tubes out of my arms and put my feet on the cold tile of my hospital room floor. I was taken by the familiar sensation, and I smiled in bewildered contentment. Somehow, I was home.

My cell phone started buzzing with the emergency tone I set for NERV calls. Still uncertain of my own voice, I picked it up.

"He-Hello?" I asked.

"Asuka!" It was Misato. "Are you alright!?"

"Yeah. I think I am. What just happened?"

"NERV's instrumentality project! Those bastards!" Misato was seething. "They've been planning this all along, and they're responsible for all of it! I'd throttle them to death myself but it looks like they all disappeared in that… incident… just now. Along with millions of other people!"

I was aghast. "What are you talking about?"

"The Evas are gone! Half of NERV's brass are gone, and all the high ranking members! Shinji and Rei are gone! Initial reports are suggesting that huge numbers of people from the Earth have suddenly gone missing, plus, the seas are back to their real color again too!"

I couldn't believe what she was saying, and I rushed to my window to gaze out at SagamiBay. I blinked in amazement. It was just like she said. The ocean was blue to the farthest horizon.

I checked myself out of the hospital without telling anyone, and returned to Hikari's house. Few people were out, and those still on the streets looked shell shocked and astonished. The trains were still running, but slowly, and it took an hour before one arrived to carry me across town to Hikari's. I planted myself in front of her television and watched confused anchors relate the stories from today. It took around six hours for them to finally get a straight narrative, delivered to them courtesy of NERV's public relations department.

The story went that NERV had been unable to prevent a Third Impact, but used it as an opportunity to infect the final Angel, Adam, with a retrovirus designed to remove its influence from our world. In spite of their success, Adam had still been able to absorb approximately 10% of the remaining humans on the planet before being ejected. However, thanks to NERV's hard work and their bold sacrifice, all traces of the Angels had finally been expelled and life could return to what it once was. The deep blue oceans, at least, proved that at least some of what they were saying was correct. But from my time in that strange otherdimensional bubble hanging high over our planet, I had reason to doubt they'd been able to defeat Adam as they claimed. I think the Angels' plan had come off exactly how they'd intended the whole time in spite of our desperate attempts to destroy them.

The vanishment toll stood in the tens of millions if not more. People who were taken seemed to come from all age groups, all cultures, and all walks of life without any discrimination whatsoever. I suppose that's what kept the fundamentalist Christians from screaming "Rapture!" as loudly as they would have liked; while only a modest percentage of their own number had been taken, the same went for Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists alike. The normal apocalyptic blathering was therefore surprisingly muted as everyone licked their wounds and tried to invent a story that would tie it all together.

During the Third Impact, most people had just gone to sleep. This caused countless accidents, injuries, and fatalities, and added to the general confusion as to what exactly had happened. Many people reported an entirely dreamless coma; only a relatively few had any kind of dream at all, and fewer still had had a dream as profound and intricate as my own. I wondered at that, but I supposed that as an Eva pilot, I was better prepared to handle the vagaries that came with the intrusion of A.T. Fields into personal psychic domains.

At 0200 hours, I finally went to bed, as befuddled and lost as any of the shaken newscasters. Yet, the theme that played through my head over and over was that life would ultimately go on. Humans had been the cause of and solution to their own problems once again. I yawned deeply and let my mind drift over the possibilities of what had happened, and where Shinji and Rei went in particular. Had they had a strange experience like my own? Had they simply decided… to stay, in the so-called Instrumentality, while I had fought to recover my humanity? Uncertain, and doubtful of ever knowing for sure, I finally fell asleep.

**End Chapter-09**

[Author:] Next up: the Epilogue and Afterword.


	11. 10 - Epilogue

**Epilogue**

It was three weeks after the completion of Human Instrumentality. A few of the missing persons returned, seemingly appearing out of empty space as confused and disoriented as those unfortunate people shocked by their unexpected reappearance. The number of people returning slowed to a trickle, and finally dropped off entirely. We didn't dare speculate whether the rest would eventually reappear.

As for NERV, well - it's going to take the International Court of Justice decades to finish sorting out that can of worms. The upper echelons of NERV believed that the Instrumentality would be the end of the world, so they took only the most cursory of measures to secure their secret files and the plan that had been guiding them all along. I watched with growing horror as discovery after discovery trickled out from the investigation. The conspiracy freakazoids were right; I couldn't believe it. The Second Impact, which killed hundreds of millions, had been an intentional effort to leverage the power of Adam for the ends of a secret cabal known as SEELE. Almost all of _them_ had vanished in the Third Impact, seemingly after getting what they wanted. The ones who returned were now in UN custody and facing a long list of charges from biological terrorism all the way down to racketeering.

Naturally, Yours Truly was also interrogated at length by Interpol over my role in everything that had happened. After three days of being grilled by an Italian prosecutor, I started to miss than the infinite synchronization tests NERV had put me through. Eventually they released me after corroborating everything I told them with decrypted records seized by police at NERV HQ. The net conclusion seemed to be that almost all the NERV personnel were innocent; we had performed our role of protecting the Earth against extradimensional invaders most admirably, and it was really SEELE that was responsible for opening Pandora's Box in the first place. Only a handful of NERV agents ended up taking a vacation to Club Fed, and no one I knew was among them.

Mostly, the government just wanted to bury the whole thing. Given that every single human alive on Earth had been affected it wasn't so easy to hide, but people eventually bought the explanation of bioterrorism with neurological agents. I was actually kind of stunned over how quickly the official myth gained traction among the populace; I guess people just believe what they're told for the most part. Anyway, the government shut down NERV completely, seized all of the equipment and materials, and I soon found myself out of a job. I whittled away the days listlessly trying to figure out what I was going to _do _with the rest of my life. Piloting Unit-02 was a hard act to follow.

I hadn't talked to Misato since the incident. Driven by some unknowable impulse, I decided to give her a call. After the sixth ring, she finally picked up her cell.

"Asuka? What is it?"

A good question. I didn't really know, either.

"I was wondering if you wanted to get together and talk about everything that happened," my subconscious answered for me. "Are you free for dinner tonight, or maybe sometime this week?"

Misato sighed. "Freer than I've been in a long time. Tonight would work fine for me."

"Okay. Meet me at Narisawa at 1900 hours?"

"I can't afford that!" she quickly protested.

"_I'll_ pay, I promise. It's… I guess it's the least I can do."

Misato was quiet for a minute.

"Okay, Asuka. See you there."

I hung up the phone, feeling strange.

I'd moved out of Hikari's house shortly after the Instrumentality incident, and now I was staying in Tokyo's prestigious Dai-Ichi Hotel. I was considering moving back to Los Angeles, or Bonn, and I wanted to be able to leave on short notice without having to justify myself to anyone. My father would take me on at his company, of course, but I wasn't sure if I was ready to move into a "normal" job after pushing myself to the absolute limits of humanity as an Eva pilot. So, I paid my rather expensive hotel bill once a week with a smile, knowing that it gave me the freedom to up and leave Japan at a moment's notice whenever I finally made a decision. I should have been hailed as a hero, but the government was trying to put the entire thing behind them as quickly as possible, and apart from granting a few interviews to news stations I was basically left on my own recognizance.

I spent the afternoon down in Dai-Ichi's spacious indoor pool. The lightly chlorinated water helped me forget the scent of LCL, which seemed to linger around me like Kirlian light. I was certain it was just my imagination, but I went down to the pool almost daily for the brief respite from the faint odor of LCL that was permanently burned into my brain from the traumas associated with piloting. I wore a generously cut pink bikini, and I got more than a few curious glances from salarymen and foreign playboys in Japan for vacation. I can't deny that I enjoyed their attention, and with Kaji dead and Shinji disappeared, I felt like a great weight had been dropped from my shoulders. One thing I learned while in the Instrumentality was that it was a mistake to blame them for my feelings. My feelings belonged to me, and they were mine to own, to shape, and to develop. I finally admitted that I had a responsibility for how I feel, and that understanding was teaching me the discipline that my Zen master had been getting at all along. It was sort of funny.

A few of the boys tried to ask for my number, but I turned them down. I think it's best to leave romance aside for a little while; I need to decide what I want from my life before I explore my sensuality and sexuality any further.

After a few hours swimming and lounging, I went back up to my room and got ready for dinner. First, I took a long shower to get the chlorine scent off my skin. Dai-Ichi was a luxury hotel through and through, and they provided soaps and shampoos so fine I didn't even insist on buying my own from outside. I scrubbed my skin pink and then dried off with their Egyptian cotton towels. The truth was undeniable – the hotel's management really had a knack for understated opulence. Next, I stood in front of my closet trying to decide what to wear. The restaurant was too upscale for my yellow sundress, and anyway, October had shifted into November and it was getting quite chilly in Tokyo. I chose a slinky black dress with black leggings, complimented by an elegant scarlet coat trimmed with real sable fur. Because I couldn't resist adding a touch of rebellion, I also selected a black choker with a fat white pearl sitting right in the center.

I took a taxi to Narisawa, and I was surprised to discover that Misato was already there, smoking a cigarette and gazing pensively into the middle distance. She was staring at the city our superiors had almost destroyed - and that we had almost saved. She surprised me by wearing a traditional blue kimono, and I found myself wondering if she'd found religion after resolving her employment at NERV. Misato didn't notice me so I cleared my throat.

"Oh, Asuka." She nodded once. "You look nice."

"Thanks. You too."

We both paused. I wasn't sure what to say to her; I hadn't exactly left on the best of terms. Maybe I regretted it.

"Misato, I'm sorry about everything that happened," I finally blurted out. "I know you were just trying to do what's best for me, and Shinji, and for everybody in the city. I guess I just lost sight of that. I had so many problems and I felt like it had to be somebody's _fault_. If I had somebody to blame, that meant I had an enemy, and if I fought that enemy I'd be doing something substantial to make positive changes in my life. But I guess that's not really true. Sometimes bad things happen and it's nobody's fault and the only thing you can do is cope, without trying to shove the responsibility onto someone else."

Misato shook her head. "I'm sorry too, Asuka. I was deceived; everybody at NERV was deceived by SEELE and that Ikari Gendo. I was tricked into following orders to advance the agenda of a greedy, self-interested conspiracy, and worse, I dragged you and Shinji into it too. I do share some of the blame."

"We didn't know any better," I said quietly. "And… isn't the truth… that we _did_ protect the city and the planet from the Angels? Once SEELE caused the Second Impact, we had to fight regardless. What they did isn't your fault Misato."

She sighed and stubbed out the rest of her cigarette. "Let's just go inside, okay?"

"Sure."

I didn't bother making a reservation, but you'd be surprised by what the equivalent of $500 in cash Yen can buy if you're well dressed and looking like a big spender. They got us a table immediately, and I gratefully checked my heavy coat, which was starting to get hot inside the warmth of the restaurant.

I ordered a bottle of sake without difficulty, and Misato eyed me curiously. I couldn't understand what she was looking at.

"What?" I asked, though without the defensive, rancorous tone I might once have taken.

"Nothing." She paused. "Well, I just wanted to say that it seems like you've grown up a lot since I've known you. What you said outside just now really impressed me."

I shrugged. "I'm the same as always – I'm just trying to be honest."

"Maybe so, but I think you're finally learning what it means to be an adult. The God knows that I'm not perfect, but being perfect isn't the goal. It's growing."

I nodded. "I think I understand."

"When I was in the Instrumentality, I saw… a lot of accusing fingers. I felt like I'd betrayed everyone, like I was responsible for where everyone went wrong. But I quickly realized that wasn't true. I didn't want to say anything to you about it, because I thought you'd just think I was blaming you. But… maybe you're right. I shouldn't hold myself responsible for your mistakes, no matter what my own were."

I murmured, "I saw something in the Instrumentality too. I saw… myself. Another me, a me who understood. I didn't get it all at once, but the longer I have to think, the more I understand."

"Oh! What are you up to now, anyway?" Misato asked, swirling a ceramic cup full of warm sake.

I shrugged. "I don't really know. I've been lounging around in my hotel room. I was thinking about going back to Los Angeles, though my father wants me to return to Bonn to start working towards taking over the company."

"Is that what you want to do?"

"Honestly… I don't know. I thought if I took a few weeks off I'd end up with an answer to that. But I'm just as confused now as when I started."

I saw Misato take a deep breath, and it seemed like she was steeling herself for something. I waited curiously.

"I got a job with a research institute contracting for the University of Tokyo. We're working on a next-generation neural interface, sort of like the ones we used at NERV to connect with the Evas. Those were an experimental product with a lot of flaws, so we're trying to develop a new model that can interface with people who have normal levels of synchronization potential."

Misato got visibly excited as she continued, "Just think about it, Asuka! Think of how many applications there could be for this technology! It could be used from everything from psychology to video games to helping disabled people use artificial limbs with a degree of precision only imagined before recently! It's more than just the simple interface you use with your iPod to say 'track forward' or 'pause' – the way the research is going, I think psychiatrists could even enter their patients' dreams. We're on the cutting edge of human-machine interfaces. From where I'm standing, the sky's the limit."

I must admit, I was intrigued. "That sounds amazing. And it's based on the experimental interfaces we used at NERV?"

"Yes," Misato answered with a nod. "And I got a job there easily due to my experience with the Evangelion project."

"Well, congratulations. That sounds like a remarkable opportunity." I laughed. "It must be synchronization tests out the yin yang though."

"I wasn't going to ask you this, but after talking to you I've changed my mind. Naturally, you're one of the world's leading experts on synchronization, too. I'd be honored if you'd consider taking a job with my contractor as a senior research executive."

I blinked, stunned into sudden silence.

"What, seriously?" I asked.

"Sure. After all, you're the Earth's single most experienced person when it comes to synchronization with synthetic intelligences. Your contribution to the project could be invaluable. Naturally, the pay would be well above industry standard; our outfit is well-funded by some of the biggest names in electronics."

I stared into my cup of sake. The opportunity she was offering was something I'd never even imagined. I thought I might never see Misato again, let alone work with her, and I wondered if I was truly up to the task. But I couldn't deny that there was something different about our relationship now. I didn't feel like she was pushing me into anything, and it was nice to be able to make my own decision without the weight of the world resting on my shoulders.

"But Misato, towards the end I couldn't synchronize with Unit-02 at all," I warned. "How do you know I won't be entirely useless?"

Misato caught my gaze, and I was taken aback and a little humbled by how intently she stared into my eyes.

"I think you'll surprise yourself, Asuka. Give yourself a chance."

To tell the truth… there was nothing I wanted in Los Angeles or Bonn. Nothing except to escape my past and leave behind everything I'd learned and made while I was living in Japan. But… if I really could contribute something new to humanity, I had nothing to be ashamed of. Instead of running from my past, I could choose to accept it, and to let it shape the person I am in the present without being controlled or defined by it. Is this what it means to finally grow up? After a full minute of internal deliberation, I gave a slow nod.

"I'd be honored to work with you, Kitsuragi Misato," I answered.

* * *

**Afterword**

[Author:] Well, it's finally done! Who knew that Misato and Asuka would become colleagues again, this time as equals? I sure didn't – I didn't guess at what was going to happen until a few sentences before.

I'm feeling kind of conflicted as to how to go forward from here. Without a doubt, this is my most popular story hands-down, but I also think that I've mined everything I wanted to get from the characters of NGE. I could force myself to do a couple more, but I'm not sure if that would be for the sake of anything except gaining hits. On the other hand, if I'm not building an audience, what _am_ I achieving with my writing exactly? Count me as "undecided" for now.

Some months ago I had a dream that I was piloting a war mecha something like an Eva or a Gundam. It was a very strange dream because I wasn't in my body, kind of like the neural interface I felt the mecha arm was my arm and the mecha leg was my leg. It was interesting because the first thing I did when I got off the loading elevator was almost fall face-first to the deck, and then when I finally righted myself I overcompensated and almost stumbled off the platform entirely. Then I got to shoot down a few drones, just like Asuka and Shinji. It's funny, people can talk all day about what's real and what's fake, but some of the most remarkable intense and memorable experiences I've had in my life have come to me in dreams.

Anyway, thank you all so much for reading!


End file.
